Ashes of the Vow

The machine is dead. Malakor is dead. Four hundred students are breathing free air for the first time in years, and somewhere beyond the valley, five families are deciding how to take it back.Scarlett Locke knows how this works. You don't win. You buy time and spend it well.The codex points southwest. Toward the border mountains. Toward the woman who left a baby on a government desk twenty years ago and walked into the dark so they couldn't have both of them. Toward answers about the web, the extraction, and what the families have been feeding with three centuries of stolen magic.She leaves the mountain with a wolf at her back, a Frostwoven heir with one working arm and nothing left to protect, and a hunting list that has never once gotten shorter. The nexus is six ley lines converging in the earth's root. The Cascade is the only mechanism powerful enough to break what the families built.And the reservoir the extraction has been filling for three hundred years is not a storage system.It's a mouth. And it's hungry.The Iron Vow Society, Book Three.