Seneca Farm

The Silver Hands were one of the best mercenary companies in the kingdom — now only one member remains. Kain Asheld buried the three people closest to him and bought a rundown farm with his last bounty, desperate for silence. Madder's Place is a disaster of rotting floorboards and wild-reclaimed fields, but the village needs him as much as he needs the solitude. As Kain clears the rot and tracks wolves harassing his neighbors, he discovers that building a life takes its own kind of strength.

The farm made it through winter, but the debt didn't go anywhere. Kain owes fifty silver on a horse, has four new plots to break — including a clay hardpan nobody mentioned at the sale — and finds himself spending his free afternoons in town helping a neighbor who won't ask for help. A farmer's daughter on the west road keeps showing up to tell him his drainage is wrong. She's right every time. And something has the wolf nervous: it won't go north anymore.