The Sovereignty's Shadow: Book Two of King's Blind Sword

The most devastating lies are the ones made of true things. The wells are dying, and no one can say why. In a realm still raw from the wounds of the old betrayal, something patient and clever is at work: a single hand behind four faces, a conspiracy built brick by true brick until it stands like a fortress no one thinks to question. Aldric knows that kind of architecture. He built it once himself, in another life, for another king. Now, with a woman on the ramparts who carries her own buried grief and a hound that refuses to be certain, he must trace the plot through archives and provinces and quiet listening rooms before the whole sovereignty is stolen out from under it, without a single sword drawn. To catch the hand behind the lie, Aldric will have to remember everything he once was, and become something the enemy never accounts for. The Sovereignty's Shadow is high fantasy in the Gaelic-Scots highland tradition: a slow-burning saga of political intrigue, morally complex enemies, and the long cost of loyalty, for readers of Robin Hobb, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Bernard Cornwell. Book Two of The King's Blind Sword.