The Broken Gate - The Longest Debt: Book One

The contract was ordinary work: deliver a fugitive carter to the town of Dunmere and collect the balance owed. A sellsword takes the paper, walks the prisoner, asks no questions. Nael Arveth has survived a century and a half of other people's wars by knowing exactly which questions not to ask.

Then, three days from Dunmere's gates, his prisoner tells him a story - about dusk deliveries into a town's north quarter, a watch paid to look away, and a fire that burned an entire row of homes with the doors barred shut. The town called it raiders. The town lied.

Dunmere is a wounded place: a once-proud crossroads town where the market runs at half its stalls, the burned quarter sits untouched after four years, and a merchant named Josiah Renn quietly collects debts from widows who have nothing left to give. Nael means to deliver his prisoner, take his pay, and ride on - the way he always has.

But an elf who has spent a hundred years outliving everyone he loved knows something about towns like this one, and about the men who feed on them. And when Renn's collector beats a grieving widow over her dead husband's debt, Nael stops asking which questions are safe.

What he starts instead is a wager: everything he has, against a merchant's certainty that no wandering sellsword could ever raise the sum - with winter closing the roads, a knight of the wrong house for company, and the road east crawling with everything a dying kingdom shakes loose.

The fire kept its secrets for four years. This winter, someone finally comes asking.

The Broken Gate is the first book of THE LONGEST DEBT - a slow-burning medieval fantasy of quiet men, patient vengeance, and the true cost of an honest reckoning. Perfect for readers who love their fantasy grounded, their heroes weathered, and their justice served cold and exact.