What Hunger Leaves Behind

Famine does not arrive as a storm but as silence.

When the crops of Prouvia begin to die and the rivers thine to bone, Princess Seravine is forced to confront a threat her kingdom cannot see, let alone survive. The court calls it misfortune. The priests call it punishment. Seravine believes and calls it something different.

A man.

Caedryn, harbinger of famine, does not offer mercy but certainty. The starving will not be saved without him, and he makes no effort to hide the cost of his aid. Every solution he provides binds him closer to the throne, to the court...to Seravine herself.

She should refuse him but instead she bargains.

But Caedryn is not simply a man who brings hunger but is hunger given form, given life. He is patient, intelligent, and impossibly attentive to the one thing he should not want.

Her.

As the kingdom fractures under unseen pressure and whispers of war spread across the borderlands, Seravine begin to understand a brutal truth...survival is never free. Every deal has a weight, every favor a price. And the moments she spends with Caedryn pulls her further from the woman she once was.

Because famine is only the beginning.
And the other riders are already watching.