Volume I of the Tales of the Valley series.

In the morning, she was learning to shoot deer with her father on the family ranch.
By nightfall, she had been orphaned, kidnapped, and auctioned off for 1,100 silver coins.
Before sunrise, she killed a man with his own revolver and blinded another with a fistful of broken glass.

That was day one.

Her sister Maria was sold to a different buyer and taken to an island fortress no one has ever broken into. Between Leah and that island lies a desert governed by a king who builds weapons between naps, a sea terrorized by a creature no one has managed to kill, a city where working to death is considered a privilege, and a frozen wilderness where something in the soil has driven every living thing mad.

What follows is the story of a girl thrown into a world she was never meant to see, discovering what people, including herself, are truly capable of — all to bring her little sister home.

232 pages. First book in the Tales of the Valley trilogy.