The Last Hosting

Seven years the realm climbs out of the mirk: Robert Bruce subduing his enemies, taking castle after castle by stealth, until only Stirling holds and a pact forces the whole matter to a field by the Bannock burn at midsummer of 1314. The hidden war climbs with it, toward an ending that has been building for four books and nine hundred years.

The order, tempered in the dark, spreads back into the emptied parishes, and comes at last to the question the whole war has circled: what an anchor actually is, and whether a stolen one was ever the right kind. Thomas the Rhymer walks the hard road into the enemy's own keeping to win back a foster-daughter he has held fast through forty years and every shape of her despair. And the Unkinged, penned and ebbing, stakes nine hundred years on one last hosting, mustered over the greatest harvest the war has ever offered.

The finale of the five-book Wardstane Chronicles, in which two hostings meet on one ground for the last time: the living realm's, and the dead king's.