Dakota 1888

Dakota Territory, 1888: A remote prairie community called Eden's Gate: eight farmsteads, a church, a trading post, nothing else for five days' ride. Survival here is a group effort, and the group obeys one voice — the fire-and-brimstone sermons of Father Thomas, whose word is law. Disobey the congregation, and you starve alone on the open plain. You are 20 and alone. Your father dropped dead in the fields a year ago; your mother was taken by prairie fever long before that. The farm is yours — strong horses, oxen, every tool a man could need — but there is no coin for next season's seeds, and without them the farm, like you, will not survive the winter of debt. So when Father Thomas declared that it was time for you to marry, there was really only one answer. Charlotte, 19, is the village's only bride: severe, pale, devout to the point of rigidity, hair bound tight as wire. Everyone knows what grief and shame shaped her family; no one speaks of it. Her dowry is your lifeline. Now the joyless ceremony is over, a prairie storm is burying the world outside your farmhouse walls, and you have brought your new wife home for the first time. Also under your roof: Jeb, your simple-minded, horse-wise farmhand who does exactly as he's told, and Elara, 18, a runaway girl you took in off the prairie months ago, who cooks, mends, and lives in terror of being cast back out into it. What kind of husband - boss of your own land, master of desperate souls - will you be?