Crumb and Crown: The Sugarfall Kingdom

The kingdom of Sugarfall scatters salt on its palace steps.

Down in the villages, a pinch of it costs a family a winter's wages. But the Crustborne crown was raised over the veins that make the stuff — and a crown never counts what it has too much of.

Cressa Crustborne counts everything. A princess who would sooner read a ledger than wear a coronet, she has trained herself to see what no one else will look at: the tribute-takers skimming souls off every wagon, her soft-spoken uncle Millet arranging a patient and bloodless coup, and — far below the warm gold floors of the only home she has known — a cold that is climbing the stairs, one knock at a time.

The maintenance men say old buildings settle. They are lying.

When the thing beneath the palace finally wakes, it does not conquer. It consumes. In a single night the crown falls, the gates break, and two thousand survivors flee into the worst storm season of the year, carrying their dead, their grudges, and a small orange child with a knot of black hidden inside his sleeve. Ahead of them waits a forest that kills the unguided and a mountain hold that has not opened its door in twenty years. Behind them, patient as winter, something that was once a grieving mother follows the only road there is — at the speed of the slowest child.

Salt could stop it. If only anyone still remembered what salt was for.

The first book of Crumb & Crown — an epic fantasy of a sweet world gone sour, where the humblest thing on the table is the last thing that can save it.