Estaria’s life in Appledale is a simple, sunlit thing — the orchards, his family, the warm routine of a baker’s apprentice who has never wanted for more. Then he reads a single word he cannot place and cannot forget: Streacresh. The search for its meaning will cost him the only world he has ever known, and draw him deep into the forests of western Gaiadra, where a long-buried truth is waiting. But to reach it, Estaria must first face the echoes of his own past.
A baker's apprentice from the orchard town of Appledale, marked since boyhood by a sensitivity to the world he cannot explain.
Read → CharactersEstaria's childhood sweetheart, raised on an orchard in Appledale.
Read → CharactersEstaria's mother and Burl's wife — a woman of standing in Appledale, composed, sharp, and not easily crossed.
Read → CharactersA woodcarver on the Creshers' Tidalrest run — gentle, watchful, quicker with his hands than his words.
Read → CharactersA baker in Tidalrest with mothering to spare — warm, clear-eyed, and married to a man the road keeps busy.
Read →A quiet orchard town in northeastern Gaiadra, and the place where everything begins.
Read → PlacesA mountain-ringed wood spoken of only in warnings, bearing the name of the Creshers' old god.
Read → PlacesGaiadra's main throughroad, from Tidalrest to Groveller's Pass — named for the food baskets it began as.
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