Aurora can’t shake the blood on her hands after Razorback’s Alley, so she slips away alone to Chauntea’s granary chapel looking for answers. Instead, she’s drawn into a vision-quest of hard choices: a single seed and three hungry fields, a shepherd’s dog guarding its flock, and a reckoning with the lives she’s touched and taken. In The Shepherd’s Burden, Aurora learns what it really means to stand between the wolves and the people she’s trying to protect.