Traveler, I need your help.

I did not choose them for their strength. I chose them because every one of them had already lost the thing they loved most — and not one of them let it make them cruel. That is far rarer than courage.

Cove Cove was a living village once. When the pirates came, all but four people fled.

The Ghost Pirate owes the Pirate King his share of the stolen gold, and refuses to pay it. So the King raised his own dead first mate to stand guard over the Ghost Pirate's ship — and now nobody can leave at all. A whole village is held still inside a debt between two dead men.

Nothing in that deadlock breaks with a blade. And the road to the cave is opened by nothing more than kindness to a grieving husband.

This is the era that frightens me most.

Four women stand accused of witchcraft, and a mob outside the town hall has already decided what ought to be done with them. The magistrate is less certain — and he will not move for the mob or against it until someone has gone into the woods and spoken with all four women.

That someone is you. Each of them will tell you something, and not all of it will agree. When you come back to him, what you say decides who burns.