One night. One murdered jarl. One boy who has to live.

When Varic butchers the jarl who raised him and seizes the high seat, he sends riders after the last loose end: the dead heir's widow and her six-year-old son. Brynhild runs north into the winter with her boy and a kitchen knife, and nothing else between them and the men on their trail.

Raef Sorensson is the last of Clan Eldr, a hold burned to the ground with everyone he loved inside it. For ten years he has kept the whole world at arm's length, close to no one, so that no one can ever be taken from him again. When the contract to hunt down the woman and boy reaches him, he reads the truth beneath it, and rides to reach them first.

He means to see them safe and vanish. Instead the road hands him a family he never chose. And at the edge of a hunt that was never a hunt, a dragon reaches into his mind and bonds to him, the first such bond in living memory, and begins remaking him into something he cannot undo.

But the men in grey who take a young dragon in chains do not serve Varic. They serve something older and colder, an order that has hunted dragons longer than the Imperium has stood, and answers to the Emperor himself. It has one command regarding the boy.

Kill him.

The Last Eldr is the first book in the Aurenth Saga, a dark, Norse-influenced epic fantasy series for readers of Christopher Paolini's Murtagh and the grounded, morally grey worlds of The Witcher and God of War.