The Salt-Black Tree

This novel begins in the precise moment where Spring’s Arcana leaves off, with Nat Drozdova galloping through hell on a demon horse whispering truths that Nat must learn but never wanted to hear, while she’s pursued by monsters determined to consume her. Nat is on the run, in a race for her life and so conditioned by her mother’s machinations that she often seems incapable of grabbing for the power she needs to save herself and become the person and the divinity that she was always intended to be. This second book in “The Dead God’s Heart” duology pulls together all of the painstaking worldbuilding of the slow-building first book and races with it toward an epic conclusion. This mixture of gods and monsters, manipulation and lies, reads like a version of American Gods by Neil Gaiman centered on the Slavic pantheon, but in this book, the reader is fully aware of the con from the beginning, and only the protagonist is flailing in the dark.