The Last Bell-Toll

For seven hundred years, the villages of the kingdom have rung nine strokes at sundown. No one remembers why.

They call it the bell-toll — and it is paid the way the weather is endured. Until war devours the bronze of the bells, and the land falls silent, tower by tower.

When the ancient bell of Mistford, a small ferry village on the great River, cracks, Tam Ricker's childhood ends in a single night. With Gret the smith, who carries a letter from a dead hand, and Cwellan the old Wright, who counts his words the way other men count their coin, he carries the bell away — across a realm where the silence wanders, and soundless soldiers stand at night with their faces turned north. His road leads to peoples older than any covenant, and down to the forges beneath the mountains.

For deep below the mountains waits the one to whom the toll has always been paid. And he has begun to count the strokes.

Classic high fantasy in an original world, told with warmth and wonder — no romantasy, no grimdark. Fantasy the way it used to be told, for readers who have been missing it.