the Far Watch: Book Two of Chronicles Sui-Denas

The war is won. The north is quiet. Captain Arder Tur Cide has a frontier to hold and a village to make into a fortress, and for one spring he lets himself believe the worst is behind him.Then the holdings begin to empty. Whole farms gone between one morning and the next, and a baroness's patrol rides into something in the empty north that should not be there at all.Arder takes six riders into the unmapped north, over a pass no southern chart has ever marked, and finds a kingdom that has stood watch for five hundred years against a thing the south has never had to name. The watch is failing. And what it has held back is already coming south.To hold his own door, Arder must learn what it costs to stand a watch that cannot be won, beside people who have been paying that cost since before his grandfather was born.The Far Watch is the second novel in the Chronicles of