The Year of Masks

Halden came to Vinenings to close a door. When exiled swordsman Halden Marcion inherits his grandmother's farm in the coastal village of Vinenings, he means to settle the deed and disappear, the same way he's disappeared from every other place for tyears. Instead, a fox-masked baker teaches him to dance. The village shows him how to work. And Linnet shows him what it means to choose something instead of running from it. But Aldreda's inheritance isn't clean. The farm sits above a secret his grandmother died protecting and there are men in the olives watching who leaves. In a place where masks hide identities and Carnival drums drive the rhythm, Halden discovers that the very things he fled, family, duty, love, were waiting for him all along. The price of staying is higher than he bargained for. But so is the cost of running.