Where the Valley Closes

The valley was supposed to be the end of the hard part. It wasn't.

Elias Rourke has led thirty settlers through a killing mountain pass
and into a high alpine valley that arrived smaller, colder, and harder
than promised. Now he has four shelters, dwindling provisions, and a
winter that has decided to stay. Livestock die. Illness spreads through
the camp. The rationing system that keeps thirty people alive fractures
them along every fault line the crossing already exposed - who trusts
whom, who controls what, and who pays when the wrong decision gets made.

Rourke has kept people alive in worse conditions. Keeping them together
is the problem he doesn't know how to solve.

Lark Two Rivers knows what the valley holds and what it can provide.
She knows the illness moving through the sick shelter, and she knows
where to find the plant that can stop it. What she cannot account for
is the cost of acting alone - of being right in a group that needed to
be asked first. The decision that saves a life costs her the settlers'
trust. The man who could have said otherwise says nothing.

She sees him say nothing.

Spring thaw brings one more reckoning. When the snow pulls back from
the valley floor, it reveals something that was there before any of
them arrived: survey stakes, driven in measured intervals across the
meadow, bearing territorial notation. Someone has already claimed this
land. The valley they built their winter on was never theirs to settle.

The land doesn't care what was paid to reach it. It never did.

Where the Valley Closes: The First Winter is Book Two of The Valley
Saga - a nine-book literary western series set in the high alpine
frontier of the 1870s. For readers of News of the World, True Grit,
and Lonesome Dove.