This one owes deep debts of gratitude to my editor, Anne Sowards, who deserves something for having to put up with me. Another big thank-you goes out to Priscilla, for going above and beyond the call of fandom in helping make the map of Alera, finally. Thanks also to the many fans at the [http://jim-butcher.com] jim-butcher.com forums, whose efforts helped us to refine and create the map by providing us with multiple reference points upon the maps they have made.

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And, as ever, thank you, Shannon and JJ.

CHAPTER 1

PROLOGUE

The steadholt was located several miles south of the ruined wasteland that had once been Alera Imperia, and it was an old one. Windmanes had not been sighted there in more than six centuries. Furystorms had been absent for even longer than that. The land, for miles about, had been a patchwork of farmlands, steadholts, villages, and roads for hundreds of years. Wild furies had been so few and so feeble that they were all but extinct.

As a result, the little steadholt had not been built with stone walls surrounding it, or with a heavy stone central hall for shelter from fury-inspired weather. It was instead a collection of cottages and small houses, where each family had lived in its own home, separate from the others.

But all that had been before the vord came.

Invidia Aquitaine stood at the outskirts of the little steadholt, hidden in the shadows.

Shadows were abundant these days, she reflected.

The newborn volcano that stood as a gravestone for Gaius Sextus, the final First Lord of Alera, had continued to spew forth clouds of dark smoke and ash in the days and weeks after its creation. Even now, the sky was covered with low clouds that would release spring rain in fitful sputters or maniacal bursts. Sometimes the rain was yellow, or red, and sometimes green. The clouds themselves were dimly lit, even at night, by an angry scarlet light from the fire-mountain to the north—and in every other direction by the steady, haunting green glow of the croach, the waxy growth that covered the ground, the trees, the buildings, and every other feature of the land the vord had claimed for their own.

Here the vord had driven their presence the deepest. Here, at the heart of what had once been Alera, they had taken the most. The croach, the living presence of the vord, covered everything for a hundred miles in every direction, choking all other life from the land.

Except here.