The Daughters of Izdihar meets The Foxglove King: An ex-soothsayer and
stranded scholar of curses upend a Utopian community that has no love for
refugees.
Radiant Basket of Rainbow Shells, scholar of curses and magical history, has spent
several years on a research expedition abroad in Quruscan, one of the four
kingdoms of the Tetrarchia. When Radiant’s home country of Loasht suddenly
revokes his citizenship—and that of his entire ethnic enclave—he soon finds that
Quruscan is no longer a safe haven either. He needs someone to help him escape:
someone with the sheer cunning to escort him to safety. The perfect candidate is
Kalyna Aljosanova: a crafty, mysterious mercenary with an uncanny reputation.
But with the political situation in Loasht far more volatile and dangerous than
when Radiant left it, he may never be able to return home to his family. Wielding
her signature guile, Kalyna finds Radiant asylum in a utopian community on the
border between Loasht and the Tetrarchia, and, for a moment, it seems like they
might finally have a safe place to stay. But when the group’s charismatic leader
grows wary of the refugees flocking over the border to his community—and
suspicious of Kalyna in particular—a brief sense of safety begins to unravel …
Kalyna the Cutthroat deftly imagines how the pressures of heroism warps even
the most unshakeable of survivors, asking what responsibilities humans have to
one another, and whether one good deed—of any magnitude—can absolve you of
your past.