A trilogy

ROADS WE OWE

Once a year, the dead get up and walk home.

Where they step, the ground turns to stone. One body leaves a strip no wider than a boot. A thousand leave a road.

The kingdom of Hohenmark has learned to keep its dead walking. Its roads run on them.

Ressa Tal walks other people’s dead home for a living. She knows what a body wants and what the family only wishes for it. This autumn the army is holding her son. She means to walk him home. To get him out, she will have to steal someone else.

Three books

  1. IThe Stolen GeneralIn progress
  2. IIA Stranger’s HomeLater
  3. IIIWhat We KeepLater

From the first page

The buckle would have to come off again.

Ressa held the strap against the window, where the afternoon light showed what the customer had paid someone to conceal. A second row of holes ran too close to the first. Under a loaded wagon the leather would part as neatly as bread along a knife cut.

On the bench beside her, a woman in a handsome yellow bonnet ate the last of Ressa’s plum cake.

The Stolen General, opening. Working draft.