The Strangers' Tide

On the misted shores where three peoples have kept their fires apart, and in balance, for longer than any story remembers, a child presses an ear to a driftwood log and whispers that something is coming. By dawn the smoke on the wind has a taste no one knows. Below Cedar Point a camp has risen in straight lines, full of men who move as one body and carry sticks that speak.

The Strangers offer trade. They offer peace. To every fire they make a private promise, and no two promises are the same.

Tala, an elder who reads omens in the water, fights to hold the old councils together. Delsin, a young Hakawi warrior, wants the weapons that humbled him more than he will admit. Yalene counts the food before she counts the enemy, and she has noticed how carefully the Strangers measure the land. And Kaelen, the calm, trusted voice of the Tamanish, always seems to know what the sea will bring next.

When the three tribes form a secret alliance and set a trap in the narrow waters of the Salt Estuary, they believe they have found the one ground where the guns cannot win. They are wrong. And the cost of that morning will fall on the one thing a people cannot replace: their trust in each other.

The Strangers' Tide is the first book of The Broken Coast, a slow-burning, mythic story of first contact, divided loyalties, and what survives when the land cannot.

For readers of The Last of the Mohicans, Shogun and The Bear and the Nightingale.