Deep in the Darkburn Forest, something is stirring. Creatures that bring fire and devastation are stalking the land. They hunt - and are hunted by - the Riders of the Vonn, a people in exile.
But when the pedlar Yaret stumbles upon an injured Rider, she too is drawn into the struggle against the mysterious beings that are known as darkburns...
Excerpt:
The hooves grew louder, faster, their vibration making the faded foliage quiver: the urgent thuddings of a heart that was about to break.
The horse burst through the bushes in a fountain of dead leaves and splintered twigs. It was riderless. And it was terrified.
Foam covered its snorting mouth: sweat ran down its heaving brown flanks from the empty saddle. Yaret stepped forward with vague thoughts of trying to catch it. But the horse barely slowed. Its eyes rolling, its breath harsh and rasping, it plunged away upstream to stumble noisily between the straggling trees at the forest’s western edge, where Yaret had left the donkeys.
The two donkeys looked up in mild surprise, but the horse did not stop. Charging out from the trees, it galloped on, hoofbeats diminishing quickly now, across the open grass until it was out of sight and hearing.
As the quiet returned Yaret stood still, considering that empty saddle. She had no wish to go any deeper into the tree-meshed darkness from which the horse had burst in terror. But a fallen rider might be lying somewhere in those shadows.
She hesitated, unnerved, and irritated by her own anxiety. The horse was nothing to do with her. Easier to just walk away.
Letting out a long sigh of resignation, she stepped into the gloom cast by the trees, alongside the infant Darkburn. Although the stream still sang on to itself, like a child at play, all else was silence. No bird calls, no small rustlings in the undergrowth. The bowed trees waited.
Yaret was readying herself to find a corpse. But she was not prepared for what came next...