Kingless

Four hundred thousand people live inside the Girdle, a wall eleven meters thick that was raised in eight months and has one honest door. They are the Exile: unweighed, unschooled, and useful. Rook Valdas is nine years old, loud, reckless and not remotely clever, and he wants one thing so badly it will eventually cost a continent — he wants to see what is on the other side.

Outside are the empires: marshals and ledger clerks, grain monopolies and quiet offices, and men who can cut a barrel in half from eleven feet with nothing but a breath and a sword. Inside are the tithe-houses, the gate clerks, the queues, and an old foreigner in a flood tunnel who was once something and will teach a boy to make his own attention heavy enough to kill with.

Rook will get out. That is not the story. The story is what he finds, what it makes of him, and the dream he has been having since he was four years old — of a black sea, of something enormous and patient, and of a woman saying a word he cannot keep.