Jester's Gambit

Corin Ashe pours ale for a living and reads a room for survival. It's enough, until the morning the woman he loves stands in the town square and swears, before the whole city, that he is a traitor. He doesn't understand why. Not yet. He only understands that his father dies trying to reach him, that the crown's guards drag him away in chains, and that Isolde's face gives him nothing at all. No grief. No apology. Nothing. Ash Hollow is where broken men go to finish breaking. Instead, Corin finds three of them willing to remake him: a forger who trusts nothing, a disgraced pirate who trusts too easily, and an old actor who once taught kings how to lie convincingly to entire kingdoms. Between them, they teach him the truth. Everyone in Vantmoor already wears a mask. He simply hasn't chosen his yet. Two years later, a masked stranger begins appearing in the city's most guarded rooms, a magistrate's banquet, a merchant lord's private office, a widow's parlor, always uninvited, always three steps ahead. Vantmoor calls him the Jester. He has come to collect exactly three debts, and he has no intention of leaving until every man who destroyed his life understands precisely whose hand is closing around him. But some debts run deeper than three names. And the woman who ruined him in that square carried a secret worth more than her own life, one she never got the chance to explain, until now. Jester's Gambit is a story about the masks we choose to survive and the ones that choose us back, about a family built from everyone a city decided didn't matter, and about a man who learns, one impossible act of trust at a time, how to simply receive something freely given. For readers of The Count of Monte Cristo, Joe Abercrombie's First Law, and Six of Crows.