Until Day Breaks

They are finding men at the wells at dawn. Grey to the hairline. Emptied of blood — and still breathing.

Meira came out of the Cursed with a name, a broken blade, and three promises from a man whose face she never saw: a family, protection, a future. Eight years behind Haven's white wall have made good on two of them. She is a healer now, the finest hands old Pella will ever train.

The third she keeps where she keeps everything — filed, unspent, and starting to look like a lie.

Then the settlement begins losing people out of their own beds. Doors unlatched from the inside. Shutters torn outward. And a wall full of watchmen who cannot say what they saw, because the thing on the southern approach does not move while it is looked at.

Kai Cinder has known Meira since he argued his parents into giving her the loft. He is the only man in Haven who walks her home in the dark, and the only one who cannot see what has been standing in front of him for six years.

Something is seated in the fields outside the wall. It has been there a long time.

And Haven is throwing a festival.