The Shades of Winter

A group of aging sea raiders go out for one last mission of revenge, and get a whole lot more than they bargained for.The Kyndred were a special band of warriors, sworn to serve their king to the death. But Njall had died twenty years before, in a war that had almost destroyed everything the people of Raeth had built, and the Kyndred had resigned themselves to living out a sad oblivion, trying to hang on to the shreds of their honour.When the chance to redeem all they had lost with this final sacrifice came, they were only too willing to embrace it, but Fate and the gods had a very different plan in mind. Morgan Smith has been a goatherd, an artist, a landscaper, a weaver, a bookstore owner, a travel writer and an archaeologist, and she will drop everything to go anywhere, on the flimsiest of pretexts. Writing is something she has been doing all her life, though, one way or another, and now she thinks she might actually have something to say. Enter a world of magic and mayhem through the experiences of everyday heroes. The novels of the Averraine Cycle follow the long shadows of a mythical past as they affect those who are confronted with the remnants of an ancient evil, one that still threatens to overturn centuries of uneasy peace.. The books are connected, but are also "stand-alone" tales that can be read in any order.