The Wolf and the Woodsman

Évike is the lone woman without power in her forest-veiled pagan hamlet, making her an outcast who has obviously been abandoned by the gods. The peasants accuse her of having a tainted ancestry because her father was a Yehuli, a despised servant of the zealous monarch. Évike is betrayed by her fellow villagers and surrendered when warriors from the Holy Order of Woodsmen approach to claim a heathen girl for the king's blood sacrifice.

However, they are forced to rely on one another when monsters attack the Woodsmen and their hostage as they are traveling, killing all but Évike and the icy, one-eyed commander. But he's no regular Woodsman; his father, Gáspár Bárány, is a disgraced prince who wants paganism to solidify his rule. Gáspár worries that his ruthlessly zealous brother intends to take the kingdom and impose a bloody rule that will doom both the Yehuli and the pagans. Gáspár and Évike strike a precarious alliance to stop his brother since he and Gáspár are both the sons of despised foreign queens who know what it's like to be an outsider.

Their mutual hatred gradually transforms into affection as their quest transports them from the icy northern tundra to the smog-choked metropolis, united by a shared past of tyranny and estrangement. However, trust may quickly turn into betrayal, and Évike and Gáspár must choose whose side they support and what they are ready to sacrifice for a country that has never shown them any concern when she makes contact with her father after a breakup and learns about her own hidden ability.

This remarkable debut, influenced by Hungarian history and Jewish mythology, is in the vein of Naomi Novik's New York Times bestseller Spinning Silver and Katherine Arden's national bestseller The Bear and the Nightingale. It follows a young pagan woman with hidden powers and a one-eyed captain of the Woodsmen as they form an unlikely alliance to thwart a tyrant.