Threshing Day

Some traditions are sacred. Others are only old.

Six hundred years ago, a man made a bargain with a god: a little of what the gifted are, each autumn, in exchange for a harvest that never fails.

Nobody told the gifted.

Now the last evening of autumn is near, and the Chancellor of Aldermoor has decided that a little is no longer enough. This year he will take everything, from everyone, in a single night.

Standing in his way are five pairs of people who have never met:

A farm girl who can give back what was stolen, and the prince sworn to marry her, who has been lying to everyone for three years, perhaps including himself.

A warrior with a monster in his blood, and the witch who ate an apple in a prison cell and offered to break his curse for a price.

A courier from the dark kingdom beneath the earth, who is secretly the lost heir to the throne, and the charming sailor who was sent to hunt her down and fell in love instead.

A healer and a rebel, who once planned a life of goats and quiet, and have spent five years learning what the world took from them.

A priestess and her immortal guardian, who have been three paces apart for twelve years and have never once said what they feel.

Their roads run through enchanted mazes, cursed battlefields, forbidden mountains and drowned catacombs. They face betrayals by the people closest to them, assassins in chapels and a hidden mastermind who has been planning this night for thirty years. And all of them are walking toward a ring of five stones, where an ancient rhyme says that if five hearts stand together and refuse, the harvest will end.

The rhyme does not say what refusing will cost.