Born into captivity as a product of the Royal Breeding House, friendless orphan Purity Drake suddenly finds herself on the run with a foreign vagrant from the North after accidentally killing one of her guards.
Her strange rescuer claims he is on the run himself from terrible forces who mean to enslave the Kingdom of Jackals as they conquered his own nation. Purity doubts his story, until reports begin to filter through from Jackals’ neighbours of the terrible Army of Shadows, marching across the continent and sweepign all before them.
But there’s more to Purity than meets the eye. As Jackals girds itself for war against and army of near-unkillable beasts serving an ancient evil with a terrible secret, it soon becomes clear that their only hope is a strange little royalist girl and the last, desperate plan of an escaped slave.
Stephen Hunt is the author of the highly acclaimed ‘The Court of the Air’. He set up one of the first science fiction and fantasy websites, www.SFcrowsnest.com, in 1994. Today the site has 700,000 readers a month. Stephen Hunt lives with his wife and children in Surrey.