Book Two opens in the same breathless hour Book One left off, and the shadows have come for the wall at last. A king of the Cursed has drawn up a host before Haven and means to take the settlement off the face of the world. The very stones men trusted wake hungry in the night; the channel that guards the town runs strangely dim; and the sorken — the leather-skinned dead, raised and worked by the enemy — pour through a breach into the heart of everything Haven loves.
But this is not a story that steel alone can win. The book follows the unlikeliest few — a crop-watering boy who should never have lifted a blade, a healer who reads the forbidden books when the men whose work it was have forgotten how, a grizzled Marshal counting his losses on a wall coming apart beneath him, and a whole town of common souls who must become something braver before dawn. They discover what the river can do that no wall ever could; they learn to read the enemy and to starve it; and they find that courage...
