Novels by YURI TATE

Elara’s POV A year to the night after the arrow, we climbed the Frostveil again. It was a different mountain. The road, which had been a ruin of broken stone and dead bones, was lined with small white flowers that bloomed only in frost. Cairns marked the way at every bend, each topped with a carved wooden horse, a child’s boot, a braided cord, or a lantern. People had been coming for months to leave something. Wolves from six packs, villagers from the marshes, a whole procession of the grieving, walking up the mountain they had once been afraid of to say a name out loud. At the foot of the final slope stood the stone. It was a plain gray monolith, twelve feet high, rough and unpolished. Three hundred and twelve names were carved into its face in neat, careful letters, the work of a single winter and one stubborn woman. She stood in front of it now in a gray cloak, a lantern in one hand, her father beside her. “Tobin Greymane,” Maren read. Her voice did not shake. “Aged four ye

Elara’s POVSpring came to the Western Reaches like an apology.The snow retreated in long, sullen shelves, leaving the hills streaked with mud and early crocuses. The rivers swelled. The air smelled of wet earth and green things waking, and for the first time in months I could walk outside without a cloak. The Sovereign had kept his promise. Winter had been quiet, and cold, and kind. No wolf had died. No village had frozen. The observers had gone home with their notebooks full of nothing but the first of a very long list of ordinary days.Dax and Kael’s wedding was set for the first full moon after the thaw.“I am not wearing that,” said Kael.“It’s a dress,” said Elara.“It’s a tent.”“It is silk. It is the exact color of your eyes. It took Laura three weeks.”“I look like a ship.”“You look like a queen.”“I’d rather be a ship.”I laughed. We were standing in the bride’s chambe

Cassian’s POVI have sat on the Concord for thirty years.I have voted for wars and against them. I have cast my stone on border disputes, on trade tariffs, on the exile of alphas who had earned it. I have never once been afraid of a room.I was afraid now.The Concord had reconvened in Silverfang’s old hall, six packs ranged around the great horseshoe table. Rain beat at the high windows. The air smelled of wet wool and old stone. Every eye was fixed on the man standing at its center.Me.“Alpha Greymane,” said Veyron, from the speaker’s chair. His voice was even. “You have asked to address the Concord before the vote. You may speak.”I looked at my daughter.She sat in the visitors’ gallery, pale, wrapped in a gray cloak, her hands folded in her lap. She had not been bound. The Queen had refused it. She has done enough to herself, Elara had said, when I tried to put chains on Maren myself. Let her sit wit

Rico’s POVI had been running for twenty stairs, and I knew exactly where the arrow was going.I saw it from the top of the final flight, a pale streak across the Heart Chamber, aimed at a silver-haired man who had closed his eyes and opened his arms. I saw Elara’s face turn toward me, white and terrible. I saw her mouth shape my name.I did not think.For four hundred years I had been the one nothing could touch, the king who walked through war with a cold smile and woke each morning exactly as he had gone to bed. It was only in the last four months that I had learned what it was to be afraid. And I had learned, with sudden crystal clarity, that I was not afraid of dying.I was afraid of standing still.I threw myself in front of the Sovereign.The arrow took me high in the chest, just under the collarbone.It did not hurt.That was the first strange thing. There was only a hard, bright shock, lik

Maren’s POVMy son was four years old when the mountain took him.His name was Tobin. He had red hair and a gap in his front teeth and a stubborn streak that drove his grandfather mad. He wandered off during a berry-picking trip, a single moment of turned backs, and by the time we found him, three days later, he was lying in a drift beneath a stand of black pines, curled around a wooden horse, his face turned up as if to listen to something.He had been asked to lie down.I have never been able to forget the look on his face. Peaceful. Content.I told my father I would never forgive the Frostveil. My father, who had lost his own pack’s children to the same cold, said nothing. He only held me.I have a gray hood and a quiet voice and a good bow. I have waited eleven years.When the Concord called for observers, I did not tell my father I was going. I told only Veyron’s old quartermaster, who owed me a favor, and who

Elara’s POVMy parents had built their house in nine days.It stood at the foot of the Weeping Falls, a low stone cottage with a slate roof, a crooked chimney, and a front door painted the color of cornflowers. Smoke rose from the chimney. Someone had planted herbs in a row of pots along the sill. When I came up the path with Flame’s hand in mine and Rico’s arm around my waist, the door swung open before I could knock.“You’re early,” said Aislin, wiping her hands on her apron. She looked ten years younger. There was color in her cheeks and flour on her sleeve. “Come in, come in. I’ve made soup.”I started to cry.“Oh, Elara, it’s only soup.”“It’s not the soup.”“I know.” She pulled me into a hug that smelled of woodsmoke and thyme. “I know, my love.”We stayed that night in the little room under the eaves, the four of us tucked into a bed meant for two. Flame fell asleep with her head on my arm. Rico, sti

Valentina ReyesI walked until the streetlights ran out of patience and the city started to feel like a stranger’s dream.Medellín at three in the morning was not the city I’d imagined. It was quieter than Queens, and darker, with narrow streets that climbed and curled around the hills in tight switchbacks. Shutters were down. A dog slept on a doorstep with its nose under its tail. Somewhere above me, on a slope I couldn’t see, a radio played a song so soft and sad it could have been a lullaby.I didn’t know where I was going.I only knew I couldn’t stand still. If I stopped, the walls would close in. The word daughter would find me. And wife, and armor, and bridge, and a dozen other words that other people kept tying around my neck like ribbons.So I walked.It took an hour. My feet, healed enough now to carry me, throbbed in the borrowed sneakers. I passed a shuttered bakery, a church with a blue door, a plaza with a dry fountain. And somewhere in the gray hour before dawn, I

Alessandro RossiVictor’s house sat at the top of a hill in El Poblado, behind a wall twelve feet high and a gate that took three men to open.It was a white villa with a red tile roof and a courtyard full of lemon trees. Floodlights, dogs, men with rifles at every corner. A swimming pool that glowed turquoise in the dark. Valentina had gone straight to a guest room on the second floor with a maid and a blanket and a cup of tea she wouldn’t drink, and I had let her go, because she’d asked for ten minutes alone and I had learned that when she asked for something she meant it.It was two in the morning.We sat in Victor’s study, a long, dim room paneled in dark wood, lined with books and trophies and a stuffed jaguar in a glass case. A fire burned in the grate, though the night was warm. Victor sat behind a mahogany desk with a glass of aguardiente at his elbow. Gino stood by the door. Kira’s face glowed on a laptop propped on a side table.And in a leather chair by the window, wit

Valentina ReyesI laughed.I hadn’t meant to. It came up out of me like a hiccup, dry and cracked and entirely out of place in that kitchen, and once it started I couldn’t stop. I stood in the middle of the room with a toy truck in my fist and laughed until my ribs ached, and the men in the doorway looked at each other, and Alessandro’s hands tightened on my arms.“Valentina.”“I’m fine.”“You’re not.”“I’m great.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my wrist. “I’ve had a good week. I got kidnapped. I got sold at auction. I found out my boyfriend is a mob boss and the father of my child, and now, in the kitchen of the apartment where my son was sold by his aunt, a Colombian drug lord rolls up his sleeve and tells me he’s my dad.”“Valentina…”“Anything else?” I said, to the ceiling. “Anyone else want to tell me something? Is the Pope my uncle? Does anyone have a long-lost twin?”Nobody spoke.I looked at Victor.He hadn’t moved. He stood with his sleeve rolled back and his can

Valentina ReyesI’d never seen a man look at me the way he did.Not with hunger. Not with calculation. Not even with the dark, careful possession I’d come to know in Alessandro’s face. This was something else, something I had no name for: an old man in a gray suit, standing in the doorway of my son’s kitchen, staring at me as if I were a ghost he’d spent thirty years praying for.Gino’s gun came up.“Gino,” Alessandro said, very quietly.“Boss, he…”“Put it down.”A long, heavy beat. Then the barrel lowered, an inch at a time.The old man didn’t seem to notice. His eyes hadn’t left my face. His cane trembled against the floor. His mouth worked, once, twice, and when he spoke at last, the polished baritone I’d heard only secondhand was gone. What remained was cracked and soft and disbelieving.“Valentina.”I stiffened.“You know my name.”“Your friend told me.” He took a step into the kitchen. Another. “On the phone, from the plane. He said Valentina Reyes had a boy, and th

Alessandro RossiI got to the kitchen door a half second behind her, and I put my body between her and the floor.“Don’t look.”“I’m looking.”“Valentina.”“It’s not his.” Her voice was thin and hollow. “It’s too much, and it’s too old. It’s not Santi’s. Please. Let me see.”I held her shoulders. Her whole body vibrated like a plucked wire. After a moment I stepped aside, because I’d promised to stop making her decisions for her, and because the blood was already days old and the thing she feared most wasn’t in it.She stood in the doorway with the yellow truck pressed to her chest and looked.Gino crouched by the table. He touched the edge of the stain with two fingers, sniffed them, and made a small, grim sound.“Two days. Maybe three.” He rose. “Big man. Adult. A lot of it, boss. A man could bleed out from this, or close to it.”“Not a child.”“No.”I felt Valentina’s breath leave her in a long, shaky exhale.The trail led from beneath the table across the linoleum to

I’d never seen the city my mother was born in, and it looked exactly the way she’d described it.We came in over the mountains at dusk. The plane banked through a gap in the clouds, and the whole valley opened below us like a bowl of jewels: hundreds of thousands of lights, climbing the green slopes in terraces, orange and gold and white, wrapped in a soft blue haze. Red brick rooftops. A river like a silver thread. Hills so steep that houses clung to them like barnacles.La ciudad de la eterna primavera, my mother used to say. The city of eternal spring. She’d whisper it in the dark, in a rented room in Queens, when she was too sick to sit up. One day I’ll take you, mi vida. We’ll eat arepas in the park and I’ll show you where I fell in love.I pressed my forehead against the cold window and cried without making a sound.Alessandro didn’t say anything. He took my hand and held it in his lap, and I felt his thumb moving back and forth across my knuckles, slow and steady, the way y