Estaria Valens
A baker's apprentice from the orchard town of Appledale, marked since boyhood by a sensitivity to other people he cannot explain.
Estaria Valens was raised in Appledale, a quiet orchard town in the south, apprenticed to a baker and brought up by parents whose respectable name concealed an uglier trade. From his earliest years he carried something he had no word for — an awareness of the people around him, of their feeling and their presence, that no one else seemed to share. He came to think of it as echoes.
His childhood was bound up with the girl next door, a closeness that grew into something neither of them spoke aloud. It was a small, ordinary happiness — and it was not one his own family would allow to last.
When loss and discovery tear him loose from the only home he has known, Estaria’s road leads far beyond Appledale: onto a caravan bound for places he was warned never to go, and toward a mountain-ringed forest where older things are waiting. What he finds at its heart will ask everything of him.