Bleak Seasons

Bleak Seasons is a fantasy novel by the American writer Glen Cook, published in 1996 and the sixth book of the Black Company series.

The book covers part of the same period as the fifth novel, Dreams of Steel, but from the position of Murgen, who is trapped in the siege of Dejagore while the fighting goes on inside and outside the walls and both armies behave with the cruelty that has become ordinary. Murgen is the company's standard-bearer and now its annalist, and Cook uses him in an unusual way: the story is told out of sequence and through a narrator whose connection to what he is describing is one of the things the reader has to work out. The novel also looks ahead to Taglios, where the Liberator's government and the company's relations with the Radisha are deteriorating at the same time as the threat from the Stranglers continues.

Cook's fantasy is written from inside a working military unit, and the books are less concerned with chosen heroes than with what a company does to survive.