There is a new one coming on 1 August, and it is a small one. What the Mountain Kept is a companion novella — about twenty-four thousand words — and it is on pre-order now. It sits after The Far Watch, and it is deliberately not a starting point: if you are new here, Footprints in the North is the quickest way in and The War in the North is the front door.
This one is a home-front story. The war happens off the page, up north, out of reach. What you get instead is the place that was left behind.
Word comes south to Black Hollow that Captain Arder Tur Cide is alive, and staying, at a war beyond the mountains that no southerner has ever seen. Which means he is not coming home, and someone else has to hold what he left: four hundred people at the last thing the Duchy held before the north began, and the only road north buried under half a mountain.
That someone is Asher. He is an engineer, not a hero, and he has an engineer's habit of seeing a shut road for what it actually is — a slow way of deciding that the people on the wrong side of it do not count. So he sets a village against a landslide, to dig the old Keldrin road out from under the ruin before the snows seal the pass for a winter, or forever.
I should be honest about the register, because I would rather you arrived with the right expectations. This is warmer than the novels. It is a making story rather than an unmaking one — men, stone, an old mason named Rickard who has been seventy years at the trade, and a season running out faster than the work is going. A slide is not a wall you take down. Most of the book is the patience that fact demands.
The dread is still there. It simply stays where it belongs — north, mostly unseen, and a good deal worse for it. Rickard puts the whole of it into one question, and I have never managed to improve on it:
“So you tell me what's up there that's bad enough to put the thing everything runs from on the run.”
What the Mountain Kept is out on 1 August. Pre-order it here: https://sui-denas.com/book/what-the-mountain-kept