Book Two — Beyond the Foundation
Some bargains can’t be killed. Some can only be held.
Months after the autumn ritual, the Sown have stopped singing. The field stands silent under the snow. And Hanna Reeves — keeper of Ashmoon Hollow’s old contract — knows that silence is worse than the song.
Seventeen children have been Marked. Their smiles are too perfect. Their dreams belong to the thing under the foundation. And the friendly notes they slip under Hanna’s door grow more confident every week: we practice every night.
When Hanna finds the letter her grandmother hid behind a cellar stone, she learns there is a way to cut the children free. But every cut costs the cutter a year of life — and the contract is older and hungrier than anyone understood. As neighbours begin to die for the children they love, Hanna faces a choice no keeper before her has dared to make: end the contract forever, at a price that may take everything she is.
Then a phone call from West Virginia changes everything. There are other Reeves women. There is, perhaps, another way. And a seventeen-year-old girl with Reeves eyes and a quiet kind of courage will see what Hanna cannot — that some bindings are meant to be carried by more than one pair of hands.
The final book in the Ashmoon Hollow duology is a folk-horror story about grief, complicity, and the unglamorous bravery of choosing to live for the people you love. Readers who came for the dread of Under the Foundation will find it here. Readers who stayed for Hanna and Ben will find what they were hoping for, too.
The cage holds. The room holds. As long as someone is willing to stand in it.
