The Penitent

From #1 bestselling dark fantasy author Robyn Abbott comes The Penitent, a gritty standalone in the unflinching Forgotten Fragments series. Perfect for fans of Richard Swan and John Gwynne, this gothic tale picks up where most epic fantasies conclude: the end of a long-fought war...

The Usurper is dead. As are all five of his children. The war is over, and thousands of conscripted peasants are marching home...

Dreams of families reunited are quickly dashed. The returned soldiers are gruff and vulgar. They slip into the Usurper's language without thinking, refuse water for fear of poison, and some, it is rumoured, have even taken the Usurper's wild fire goddess into their hearts. Quickly, whispers of war wraiths—demonic spirits that haunt the battlefield and possess surviving soldiers—echo throughout the duchy.

Amid the chaos, a family pulled apart by war is meeting again for the first time in years: a weary conscript who gave the last decade of his life to his commanding officers, a determined mother caring for a highly-intuitive magical child, and a hopeful teen boy desperate to meet the father he barely remembers.

With a decade of secrets between them, hysteria broiling in the streets, and flickers that look like human shadows looming in the background, this family of strangers just might find themselves questioning whether the war is really over at all...