Title Page

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Dedication

For anyone who has ever felt like they were lost in a storm, and for the people who held my hand as I walked through my own.

Map

PROLOGUE

Thirteen Years Ago

He did not understand the day they took him from his mother.

He did not understand why the soldiers behaved so cruelly, or why his mother did not object. She only watched with tired eyes and turned away as he kicked and screamed and bit at the soldiers’ wrists to tear himself free. When he managed to break away, he ran and slid the last distance on his knees, his threadbare clothes doing little to keep his skin from scraping against the stone. He ignored the sting, and clutched at his mother’s legs, burying his face in the fabric of her skirt so he did not have to see the way she still kept her gaze from him.

Cruze had known he was not like other boys. There was no large, happy family waiting at home for him. But he had had his mother. Until the king’s soldiers peeled his scrawny arms away from her knees and dragged him away. She never looked back at him, no matter how he screamed, not even so he could memorize her face one last time.

Once his fingers were wrenched from their last hold on the doorway to the room he and his mother shared, there was no stopping the men who carried him. He was hauled down the stairs and marched outside the ramshackle building. The other women he had grown up around watched warily, but did not speak a word on his behalf, not even the kind ones who had offered him refuge in their rooms while his mother worked. They watched from their doorways and windows as he was shoved into the back of a wooden wagon. The soldier threw him, and he landed on his side, his hip striking painfully against the floor of the cart. Before he could regain his footing, they slammed and barred a wooden door, locking him away in the darkness.