The Gangrel Boy

Scotland, 1296. Edward I sacks Berwick and carts the Stone of Destiny south to Westminster, and the chronicles record the theft of a coronation seat. The chronicles are wrong about what was stolen. The Stone was the wardstane: the anchor of an ancient compact that kept the dead of Scotland sleeping, and with it gone, the kirkyards are going cold, something is riding the night wind, and the order sworn to keep the old offices is down to two old people and a mule.

Tam is thirteen, orphaned at the sack, a gangrel boy begging his way around the parishes of Ettrick Forest with a curse he hides: he sees the newly dead. Worse, they see him, and trust him. When a village's dead stop resting and the blame lands where blame always lands, Tam is saved from a drowning-trial by Thomas the Rhymer himself, the harper who vanished into Elfland and came back unable to lie, and learns what he was born as, and what is gathering the unforgiven dead of a war-torn realm under a single will for the first time in nine hundred years.

Apprenticed to the last two Wardens of Scotland, Tam learns the trade the chronicles never recorded: the watching, the weighing, the kisting; iron, rowan, salt, and sense; and the one rule that outranks all the others. And as Wallace's rising sweeps toward the great field at Stirling Bridge, the boy nobody wanted walks with the harper, the howdie-wife, a ferryman's daughter, and a friar with two nails toward the battle history remembers, and the hidden one, fought the night after, that it never saw.

The first book of a five-book epic in which every recorded event of the Wars of Independence happens exactly as history says, and everything the chronicles could not see is at stake.