What the Crossfire Spares

WHERE THE SNOW CLAIMS GROUND
BOOK FIVE

Elias Mercer cannot walk under his own strength anymore, and the search party hunting him is close enough that Netsuwa Blackwater and her brother Howsa carry his weight between them across open ground in the dark, one careless footfall from discovery. The infection that has been building since a punctured boot sole in the mountains has turned into something that could kill him faster than any hired gun, and the only people left who might save him are scattered across a territory that no longer has anywhere safe to hide.

What follows costs everyone something. A trader who owes an old debt. A settler midwife who has never asked anyone's allegiance before now. A foreman who has spent two books watching his loyalty to Whitfield Coe erode and finally has to decide what that erosion is worth. And Marguerite Fontaine, who has balanced every faction in this fight against every other for three books running, discovers that balance was never going to be a place she could stay.

Netsuwa already gave Elias her trust, and then her love. Now the ground itself is asking her for something harder: a choice between the man she loves and the people she was born to protect, made in the same terrible morning that the fight between the syndicate and her family finally stops being fought with paperwork. When the first shot is fired, it will not be the last, and it will bring a United States Army detachment into a territory that was never going to stay quiet forever. Whose side will Captain Josiah Redd actually take?