The Books

The war is won. The Captain is not coming home.

Word reaches the frontier village of Black Hollow that Arder Tur Cide is alive, and staying, at a five-hundred-year war beyond the mountains that no southerner has ever seen. It falls to Captain Les Asher to hold what the Captain left behind, four hundred souls at the edge of the world and the only road north buried under half a mountain.

Asher is an engineer, not a hero. But he knows what a shut road truly 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 ancient Keldrin road out from under the ruin before the snows seal the pass for a winter, or forever.

It will cost him more than a season. And when the mountain is finally made to give the road back, Asher learns the thing the north has always known.

A road runs both ways.

What the Mountain Kept is a companion novella in the Chronicles of Sui-Denas, following the novels The War in the North and The Far Watch.

The war is won. The north is quiet. Captain Arder Tur Cide has a frontier to hold and a village to make into a fortress, and for one spring he lets himself believe the worst is behind him.

Then the holdings begin to empty. Whole farms gone between one morning and the next, and a baroness's patrol rides into something in the empty north that should not be there at all.

Arder takes six riders into the unmapped north, over a pass no southern chart has ever marked, and finds a kingdom that has stood watch for five hundred years against a thing the south has never had to name. The watch is failing. And what it has held back is already coming south.

To hold his own door, Arder must learn what it costs to stand a watch that cannot be won, beside people who have been paying that cost since before his grandfather was born.

The Far Watch is the second novel in the Chronicles of Sui-Denas. Out now.

Captain Arder Tur Cide has seen the army in the mountains. Four thousand men, led by a general the Duchy cast out and forgot about. He didn't forget.

While Valbena debates, the north burns. Arder rides for his company with two of his scouts, racing to reach them before the fighting starts. His brother Cel marches with the Guards. At Dren Hollow, a sergeant named Hugo holds a timber stockade with a garrison that was never built for war.

Behind them all, in the corridors of Valbena, a baron's scheming is quietly reshaping the war from within.

The War in the North is the first novel in the Chronicles of Sui-Denas. Out now.

The northern beacons have gone dark. Three years of silence from the frontier, and the Duchy of Valbena has done nothing about it. Now, with rumours growing and patience wearing thin, a patrol of eight is sent north to find out why.

What Captain Arder Tur Cide and his scouts discover is not the quiet of abandonment. It is the quiet of something waiting. Gouged sigils on watchtower walls. Empty settlements stripped clean. And in the passes beyond, an army flying a banner that should have been buried with history.

As the patrol pushes deeper into hostile ground, the evidence mounts: this is not raiders or bandits. This is organised, funded, and deliberate. And the threads lead not only north, but back into the council chambers of Valbena itself.

Footprints in the North is a prequel novella to The War in the North. It is a story about soldiers doing their job in a place their country forgot, and what happens when the silence finally breaks.