The Emberwright and the Hollow Crown

Fennick Emberwright has lit lamps for other people his whole life. He never expected to be the only witness to a theft that kills spring. When the Hollow Crown vanishes from the royal vault, the ward-stones fail and winter begins walking south. Pressed into a doomed errand by a knight with a ruined knee and a fox who insists he used to be a dragon, Fennick must cross the Murkfens and the frozen Shrine beyond to find the thief — and discover that the Crown was never a treasure. It was a lid. Somewhere beneath the world, something cold has been waiting three hundred years for someone to open it, and only a lamp-lighter's apprentice knows how to answer with something smaller and brighter than magic.