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.