Description

After being exiled in his youth, Feilan has earned a comfortable, complacent life in the Siftar trading post. He has very little to worry about...

...aside from a would-be emperor with covetous eyes on Siftar's trade network, the Vaer raiders who insist on camping nearby every summer, the warrior who got him exiled all those years ago – and the jolterhead who thinks it's perfectly reasonable to walk the new child-queen of Seven Hills into the raiders' camp to beg for help.

Renart is young Queen Adeline's uncle, and he's trying to save her from a dangerous regency. They desperately need champions for a monster hunt, and Renart is not exactly grateful to Feilan for diverting them for their own safety.

He's very grateful to Feilan for falling for the trick he tries next.

Feilan finds himself accompanying Renart home, under orders to win the monster hunt to earn Adeline a throne and Siftar a trade deal. The monster's more than even a Vaer warrior can handle alone, so he'll need to pull together an unlikely alliance to stay in the game.

Meanwhile, he has a marriage to fake, and he soon finds spiky, provocative, lonely Renart to be a man of secret depths and unsung courage.

But there's more than one monster in Seven Hills, and the one who wears the human mask is far too accustomed to power to let an interfering barbarian take it away...