COMING SOON!

As the third book in the Streets of Skelderheim book series, Azaya and her sister, Rinna continue their adventures in the Central Expanse. The festival in the Khuuransh lands is going full swing, people are trading, and life seems pretty good, but under it all, Azaya still senses something’s a miss.

The festival has grown into something the size of a small city. Six hundred stalls, ten tribes, prayer flags strung between yurts and karukka on both banks of the river. Merchants want to make it permanent. Elder Kira wants to know who is going to run the dang thing.

Azaya and Rinna spend their days the way eight-winter-old girls do. They learn fire meat from a Nominkhuu cook and yak jerky from two elder cooks who quietly begin sharing recipes. They sit with a Haan clothesmaker who explains how a coat is built and then sends them home with a gift worth half a season’s wages. They ride out on the steppe with their friends, hunt deer, brush the yaks, and take one very memorable joyride on the back of a yak calf.

Meanwhile, storytellers have arrived, and they have found their favorite subject: a Veil guard with one arm who saved a little girl on the docks at Eberhard. By the third telling, Lenne has slain a hundred warriors, her blade has a legendary name, and the Line itself reached down to heal her. Mothers start calling her Honorable Mother and holding their children out for her to touch. Lenne, who is twenty winters old and would mostly like her daughter to help with chores, has to work out how to be a mom and a legend at the same time.

Azaya knows that feeling well. Inside Kira’s camp, she and Rinna get to be girls. Outside it, they are the Altay, and a single sentence from either of them moves thousands of people. The adults around them are beginning to see how much they handed to two children, and Azaya is beginning to see how much of it she handed to a sister who wanted a friend and received a whole world instead.

So Azaya does the thing that keeps catching everyone who loves her off guard. She asks for guidance from the one place that has held steady through all of it, and she asks for it formally, in front of both tribes, in a white robe with a gold belt.