The Hearth-Year: A Sorethel Novella

Venne keeps a hospitality lodge on the western road, and the law she keeps is older than the empire that built the road: the fire is lit, the door is open, and no traveler is ever asked their name, their road, or their coin. She does not decide who is fed. Keuru carried that weight off a thousand years before she was born. There is only the bowl, the bread, the fire, and the door that >Across one year - thaw to frost to thaw again - the door does not stop opening. The grateful come, and the graceless, and the dangerous, and the dying. The stores run low and the law does not bend. Her husband, a river-trader who left the current for her fire, counts the cost in days he no longer rides. And Venne, who may refuse no one, learns the one thing the open door was never built to >A warm, exact novella about hospitality as a costly craft, a marriage seen from inside, and what it takes to be the place where others rest. The Deep World, for once, lit by the fire instead of buried under it - and no less honest about what the warmth is paid in.

Pages: 120, Paperback, Independently published