Emrys Vale
At the Naming, the deep dark below the Emberhold spoke a name -- and it was hers.Kestrel came to the valley a mapmaker, nineteen and unremarkable. Now she is ash-marked, named by the dreaming thing that sleeps in the Throat, and every dragon in the caldera is watching her door. The matriarch is failing. The warrior courts call the Naming a tyranny. And the lullaby the Wardens sing to keep the dream asleep is thinning -- the frays multiply.Then Prince Lucan reaches the Ashen Gate with forty wagons, two hundred men, and vials of white fire -- the one flame that burns memory itself. He means to burn a wall. What he would actually burn is the quarantine keeping the world safe from the dream.To save the valley, Kestrel must offer the dream the one thing no ledger ever counted: a story that is entirely her own.