Liyana has trained her entire life to be the vessel of the goddess of her village. She must dance to summon the deity who will then inhabit her body and use magic to bring water to the desert. But at the end of the dance, she is still there. She is blamed by her tribe and abandoned in the desert. She thinks all is lost until she meets, Korbyn, a god inside his vessel. He tells her that the other tribal gods are missing and they set off across the desert in search of the other vessels. The desert tribes cannot survive without their gods’ magic.
Johnston weaves a beautiful tale of sisterhood and love, while re-creating the story A Thousand and One Nights. Similar to the original story, this is a desert setting and the king has taken 300 wives, one from each village, before coming to the village of our unnamed heroine. She asks her sister’s mother to help ready her for the king. She wants to take the focus off of her sister and offer herself to the king instead, in order to save her sister. She is swept away with the king, as he has chosen her, and taken to his palace.
Signy Valborn was only seven when she climbed the New World Tree and Odin declared she would be one of his Valkyrie. Since then, the Child Valkyrie has grown to be a disappointment. She has failed to solve the riddle given to her by Odin, and thus has been isolated from the other Valkyrie for three years now. Then, Signy meets the mysterious and somewhat alluring Ned Unferth, a troll hunter who claims he has the answer to her riddle. Signy then embarks on a journey to seek out her destiny, even if it's not the one she anticipated.
Before she was even born, Nyx was sold by her brutish father to the demon Gentle Lord that rules over Arcadia. He made a bet with the Gentle Lord, and lost, like many other foolish people in Arcadia. It has suffered for almost 1000 years under the Gentle Lord's rule and the demons that escape his castle from time to time. When a person lays eyes on a demon they either die or go insane. So things don't look too good for Nyx. She arrives at his castle, ready to kill him, as she has been trained, but things of course don't go according to plan.
