Under the Chained Mountain

Disgraced and distraught, Margitte von Oderberg is walked down the aisle by her brother, the king, to marry a stranger. She is to be sentenced to obscurity, sent to the backwaters to wed a nobody - something her pride as a princess cannot take.

Only her new husband isn't a stranger, but someone who has loved her from afar for so long. He is willing to enter into a disastrous deal with the king to have her, pay him with coal, gold and jewels dug from the mountains around from the ancestral Oderberg home until the birth of their first child. But there is a catch. No gold and no baby - no wife.

Desperate to be free of her brother's hold, Margitte's new husband throws himself into mining, finding little that might appease the monarch, that is until she receives a mysterious tip. With the gold flowing and her relationship blossoming it seems the former princess is settling into her new life, until the king demands the impossible - that they mine Verketteberg, the Holy Mountain, where a deadly ice giant sleeps.

But when their marriage and the future of Bergam depends on magic, myth, and the dangers they hide, will Margitte and her husband truly be able to pay the price?