Yara has hidden her ability for ten years, a cold presence behind her eyes that tells her how close someone is to the edge of dying. Then a man with soldiers and a burning farm arrives and gives her a choice that is not one. Find the Deathless King's hidden death. Destroy it. Free the north. He has ruled for three hundred years from a mountain fortress carved into rock. He cannot be killed. He cannot age. His death was cut from his body by a sorcerer and hidden where no one can reach it. The stories say he is a monster. The stories say he feels nothing. Yara is sent to find out which ones are true.

The ward holds back the cold north. The ward holds back the things in the cold north. Forty thousand people in the Berezov lordship sleep through their winters because of it, and have for two hundred years, and have never asked what it costs. Andrei Berezov is the latest in his line. When he finds the journal documenting the crime, he rides north to face the woman his family put in the water. Fen has been bound to the river since before his great-grandfather was born. She was promised it would be temporary. She remembers warmth. She remembers bread. She remembers the man who lied. Freeing her ends the ward. Leaving her makes him the latest in a line of men who looked the other way. There is no version of this where everyone lives.

A woman has tended the garden inside for four hundred years. She has forgotten what tending is supposed to mean. Then contamination begins moving downstream. An alchemist named Severin traces it to its source, follows it through forest no map records, and finds the wall. He finds the gate. What waits inside has been waiting longer than any kingdom has stood. The wall was not built to keep him out. It was built to keep her in. The contamination is the lesser problem.