The Mirk Years

The Elfin road is shut and the enemy's army penned, and none of it saves the realm from the mirk. Wallace is taken, and hanged, and quartered, and his body sent to four towns to teach a country despair, and the despair grows, in floods.

Bruce murders the Red Comyn before an altar, is crowned in the blood of it, excommunicate, and is crushed at Methven in a season, and scattered, and hunted through the west like a beast, and the whole realm becomes one field of despair, the richest the war has ever grown.

And the order that has always contested the harvest breaks under this one, for it is everywhere at once, and the eldest Warden is failing, and the fellowship is strained past what ten souls and a boy grown to a man can bear. The darkest book of the five-book Wardstane Chronicles asks whether an order built to keep the dead from despair can survive despairing itself, and what it costs to find out.