The House of Tides: Book I Nine Oaths: 1

Thirteen-year-old Einar has never belonged anywhere. Then his mother wakes him before dawn, leads him to an ancient burial mound, gives him a broken Roman fragment-and tells him to lie about where it came from. By the next morning, she is gone.Sent to the House of Tides, Einar enters a world of fosterlings, hostages and heirs raised beneath one roof in the storm-bound Orkney islands. There he meets Sigurd, the jarl's proud and gifted son; Aila, who weighs every answer against its consequences; Yrsa, who can turn memory into story; and Fionn, whose jokes conceal divided loyalties.As rivalry becomes friendship, Einar discovers that the House stands upon older foundations. Sealed rooms, Roman traces and the mysterious Nine Marks point towards a history no one is willing to explain. Worse, Einar sometimes perceives fragments of the past-unbidden, painful and dangerously incomplete.To find the truth about his mother, he must learn the difference between evidence and belief, loyalty and obedience, and the stories people inherit and the choices they make.The House of Tides begins The Nine Oaths, a sweeping historical-fantasy saga of friendship, memory and power in medieval Orkney.