Deep Seal

In the Seven Hearths the warm season lasts a few short weeks, and every one of them is counted.
Asera has walked the high routes for most of her life with Korr at her left side: a giant gray wolf, nineteen winters old, whose warnings she has learned to take seriously. Eleven years ago he came back alone from the collapse that took her father. So when Korr refuses to cross the marker at a long-closed mine portal, Asera listens. The portal is breathing warm air. Nothing down there should be warm.
A survey crew misses its return signals. A lamp cord runs straight into solid stone. In the old service lines something answers the hammer, and then it answers the arrow.
To survive the Long Night, Asera, the engineer Orven and the stock keeper Nara must persuade seven quarreling Hearths to give up their heat, their richest vein and their certainty for a plan that has never been tried and cannot be undone.
They call it the Deep Seal. Everyone will pay for it.
Illustrated throughout with nine frontispieces, forty-five full-page plates and sixty chapter vignettes.