Ballad of the Blacksmith's Son

Keri, the blacksmith's son, hoped for a little more time between his first kiss and his last, but war and the weather wouldn't wait. One of thirty drafted, he and his friends find their stumbling romances are interrupted by a desperate forty-day trek through a snow-buried wilderness to the king. Disasters both natural and man-made defy their passage. Then the wolfpack shows up: unnaturally large, unnaturally led, unnaturally anxious to stop them. Blood in the snow forces an unsteady Keri in...