Crossroads

Once every fifty years, on the night of the black moon, the wind stops on all four roads at once.

Tobias Wrenfield is thirty-eight, the big, broad, brown-bearded keeper of the Lantern & Key, an old coaching inn on the windy moor at Gallows Cross. He has never made a bargain in his life. But the inns leather ledger holds a page older than the kingdom, and on it his late grandmother wrote one instruction for him: keep the hearth, keep the book, sign.

Tonight the taproom is empty, the fire is roaring, and at the stroke of twelve someone knocks three times.

Ithren, the Warden of the Crossing, is a fallen angel who looks forty-two: huge and grave, silver-haired and silver-bearded, deep brown skin, enormous black wings that barely fit through the door. Malrec, the Broker of the Crossing, is a demon who looks thirty-six: golden-tan, long black hair, two curved dark horns, a wicked mouth and a laugh to match. For a thousand years they have fought over every soul that bargains at the crossing, and signed their truce at this very fire.

They have also been keeping a secret for nearly as long. And they have been watching Tobias for fifteen years.

They will not take a single thing from him. That is the oldest rule of the crossing. But they would very much like to ask.

So the innkeeper picks up the quill and sets the terms himself, in his own hand, with one word that stops everything. And before the sun comes up over the moor, he is going to learn exactly what an angel and a demon can give a man who says yes.