Forced to abandon his family, trapped on the wrong side of a civil war, and unsure of who to trust, a young wanderer is caught in a bad way. If he is to make any sense of the world, he'll have to face arrogant nobles, blizzards and beasts of the wild, and the roots of a conspiracy far larger than himself. His employers can't be trusted, and his companions are little better than vagrants and liars. Soon his quest for coin and survival becomes much more complicated than he would have wished-and it was already too complicated to begin with. His slightly lacking talents with a blade will come to the test more than once, and other powers are just on the verge of arising...