White Feathers: A Novel

A child born white-haired is carried into the mountains at birth and returned to the sky. It is not a euphemism. It is a form of words, read aloud at the door by a clerk who has taught himself to be a document, and it has been read at four hundred doors a year for three hundred years.One of those children lived.Raised in exile on a mountain by the last of an exterminated winged people, Zane comes down at twenty-five as an envoy to the kingdom his empire is sworn to erase - and falls in love with its heir. Rhea has spent her life explaining away the candles that lean toward her. Neither of them knows yet that their two countries have been paying for their existence in instalments, twice a year, in the second week of spring.WHITE FEATHERS is an epic of two crowns, one mountain, and the quiet administrative machinery by which decent people, doing their jobs correctly, arrive somewhere unforgivable. It begins with a column in a tax register - put there forty-one years before anything happened, by a competent clerk with a ruler, for a perfectly good reason.Nobody ever has to make the list. The list is already there.For readers of grounded, character-driven fantasy in the key of Guillermo del Toro and Denis Villeneuve's DUNE: restrained magic, adult stakes, a romance and a war escalating on the same heartbeat, and an ending that costs something.A standalone novel. First of a planned cycle.