June Ainsworth

Will you be fast enough? A 15-year-old girl with a gift for violence and nothing left to lose, Constanter is running. To escape the farm she grew up on in a remote part of the Western Lorian empire. To forget the family and the life she can never return to. She runs east, toward the distant war she knows only from the tales of travelers - a 20-year long conflict, opposing the Western and Eastern halves of the empire.

Sophie Crestwood is never going to catch a husband, and she's not even sure she wants one. Her father is a gossip, her mother keeps her nose in a book, and her naughty brother Jack has been dismissed from boarding school. Worst of all, a pirate moves next door into Pembroke Hall. When Sophie's sent to a matchmaking party at a neighboring estate, the rumored pirate from Pembroke arrives and distracts everyone from the summer festivities.