Yara Valdsson

The Mercy Roads appear only to the desperate—old stone paths that surface in the geography of every land, leading somewhere safer than where you are. No map shows them. No census records the people who walk them. But the roads have been there for longer than the civilisations that have risen and fallen around them, and the fire rings are always clean, and the waystations are always standing, and the stone under your feet is always warm. The roads were built by a people who are gone. Their language is unreadable. Their city is unfindable. What they left behind is this: a mechanism for the running. And built into the mechanism, carefully, deliberately, a fact they understood—that what pursues you on the roads is not what you fled. It is the deeper thing. The thing under the surface fear, the thing you have been carrying for longer than you have been running. The roads show you what you are actually running from. *The Mercy Road* is fantasy about running, pursuit, and the question of what we're actually fleeing when we think we're escaping something else. It follows Yara from the moment she steps onto a Mercy Road on a spring morning—running from a marriage contract she didn't agree to—through the journey that reveals what she's been running from for much longer than one night. The novel unfolds across four parts: The Road Appears (what the road costs, the texture of running, first dark); What Follows (the shape of what pursues, what Yara is running from, the rules, the child); The Road Narrows (what Yara is actually running from, the woman who has been here before, the builders, the pursuers can speak); and The Road Ends (the final stretch, the city, the morning after, Yara looks back, she stays). Yara is not a hero in the conventional sense. She is practical, careful, good at variables and calculations—someone who approaches problems by cataloguing what she has and what she needs. She did not choose to run because she was brave. She chose to run because the alternati