The Witch Roads

Elliott (Furious Heaven) opens a new series with this page-turning epic fantasy, throwing lowly deputy courier Elen and her nephew, Kem, into peril as they unexpectedly encounter the high and mighty of the Tranquil Empire. Elen’s duties require her to make a circuit of backwater village Orledder Halt, keeping watch all the while for the deadly Spore, a contamination that mutates and kills all life it touches. Then Prince-Warden Gevulin arrives in town unannounced. He’s on a secret mission northward—but an avalanche has blocked the imperial roadway, a fact that the prince’s rival, Prince Astaylin, Exalted General of the Corps of Imperial Engineers, should have alerted him to. Gevulin is generally above noticing people like Elen, but she and Kem are the only two at Orledder who know a passable path. They join his party—and witness a bizarre change in Gevulin after he chooses to overnight at a haunted ruin. His unpredictability adds to the danger on the road, where threats abound in the form of the Spore, nonhumans, and human agents who seek to thwart their mission. Elliott builds an impressively complex world, combining a feudal social structure with a bio-magical threat and a history so ancient that much of it is unknown. Readers will be eager to see where this story goes next. (June)