Lisbon, 1640. A kingdom is stealing itself back from an empire — and a fourteen-year-old girl is learning to read the theft in ledgers.

Isabela de Bragança is nobody: the dark-skinned ward of an old antiquarian who trades in books, debts, and other people's secrets. But Solomon Curiel has given his pupil three gifts no one can see — a merchant's ciphers, a memory that forgets nothing, and the truth that every empire is built twice: once in blood, and once on paper.

When Portugal rises against Spain in the winter of the Restoration, Lisbon becomes a city of passwords and knives. Spies buy children's silences. Bankers weigh loyalties in wax and seal. And somewhere between a fencing master's lessons and a dying man's last instructions, Isabela discovers that the ledgers she copies are a map of a secret war — one that has already written her name in it.

The Winter of Iron and Silver opens the Chronicles of Blood and Sugar: a saga of ciphers, empires, and one girl the paperwork could not hold.

For readers of Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Bernard Cornwell, and Diana Gabaldon.