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Where the Gods Keep Their Teeth: The Five Trials
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 3 2026
Pages: 252
Weight: 0.68
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Solvei Ashborn has spent four years making herself small.
Not from weakness. From precision. She carries an unsanctioned Sight - the völva-gift, raw and uncontrolled - and she has watched what happens when people carry things too large for them. Her father made an iron oath to a god and lost his mind to it. She will not make the same mistake. She has put the hunger in a controlled place and kept it there, and she has managed, and she has been sufficient, and she has been fine.
Then the god Var chooses her for the Blodsval.
The Blood-Choice. A ritual held every seven years at the geographic centre of Kaldrvast, where the five holds converge and the gods turn their full attention to the mortal plane. Five women compete in five trials - one for each god, one for each hold - and the one chosen by the gods becomes the Vál: the vessel, the oracle, the living bridge between the divine and the human world.
Solvei did not ask to be chosen.
She goes anyway.
What she finds at the Blodsval is not what she expected. Not the trials, which ask things of her that no amount of management could have prepared her for. Not the rivals, who become - against every reasonable prediction - something closer to witnesses. Not the god Brynn's trial, which strips the management away entirely and shows her the full, terrifying size of what she has been containing.
And not the two men placed in her radius by circumstance who stay there by choice.
Eirik Halvard carries seven kill-marks and a silence that costs him something to maintain. He protects completely or not at all. He is the most patient person she has ever met and she does not yet understand why.
Brynar Solkind is Brynn-touched from birth - saturated with desire in a way that is not metaphorical - and he names things accurately, and the naming is its own form of intimacy, and that is the most dangerous thing about him.
The trials will ask Solvei to receive, to want, to be honest, to endure, and to open completely.
The gods are not cruel. They are simply accurate. And what they see in her is something she has spent four years refusing to look at directly.
The wanting was never the problem.
She is only now learning what that means.
Where the Gods Keep Their Teeth is a dark romantasy set in a Norse-inspired world of iron oaths, living gods, and the specific cost of carrying things too large for a mortal life. It features a slow-burn polyamorous romance, rivals-to-allies dynamics, and a heroine whose arc is not about becoming powerful - it is about learning that she already was.
Book One of The Five Trials.
Perfect for fans of A Court of Thorns and Roses, From Blood and Ash, and The Bridge Kingdom.
Content advisory: Divine violence, loss of autonomy, grief, ritual trials, inherited trauma, and romantic and sexual tension. Intended for readers 18+.
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