Fifty years ago, a hero saved the kingdom and died a legend... Or so the story goes.

Ursula Karr has spent the last year running: from an orphanage that called her a freak, from guards who call her a fugitive, and from a magic she can't control and doesn't understand. When a bounty hunt finally catches up to her, she's certain her story ends in a cage.

Instead, it ends in a clearing full of bodies, and the appearance of a monster wrapped in the remnants of an old knight's armor, with claws quick enough to end a small army before it can finish screaming.

He doesn't want a companion. He definitely doesn't want a child, but he can't leave her to the world that made her a target, and she has nowhere left to run except toward the one creature everyone else is too afraid to face.

Both of them are about to find out that the stories they've been told, about heroes, about monsters, about what a person becomes and why, were never as simple as anyone wanted them to be.