About the book
King Aldric is a careful, competent ruler, and it is not enough. For ten years he has governed from a clean and comfortable height — through reports, through systems, through the falcons he loves more reliably than he has ever managed to love his people — while a winter that refuses to end tightens around his kingdom and his subjects begin to whisper that the cold is his fault.
His own commander sees what Aldric cannot: that a kingdom dying at ground level cannot be saved from the sky. Dismissed one time too many, Voss arranges a hunting expedition into the territory of the wolves — far enough north that no one is meant to return.
But Aldric returns. Broken, abandoned, stripped of everything that made him a king, he is taken in by a wolf pack and slowly remade by it — taught an authority that never performs, a belonging he has no word for, and the hard difference between watching a thing and standing inside it. When he finally turns south, there is no army at his back. There is the pack, a half-wild falcon, and a kingdom that has been waiting in the cold for a different kind of king.
The King's Winter is a standalone work of literary fantasy about power and humility, betrayal and return, and what it costs a man to lead from among his people instead of above them. The winter never lifts. That, in the end, is the point.
About the author
L. J. Borland writes adult literary fantasy from the high desert of southern Arizona — stories where the mythic presses up against the ordinary world, and neither comes away unchanged.
Over two decades in the making, the Ring Keepers saga sits alongside a shelf of standalone novels that range from frontier legend and occult ledger to the long cold of a forgotten king, and a science-fiction epic at the threshold of the unknown.
Where to find it
Available on Amazon (paperback & ebook). Listed on Goodreads.