A Tale of Wending Vale

The Dragonwarden's Apprentice

Ages 10-14Coming soon

Eleven-year-old Zachary sweeps ash for an alchemist and isn't allowed in the stillroom. Then he rakes a heavy black stone out of the back of the furnace, and it stays hot in the frost. By midwinter he must learn four old disciplines, FIRE, WATER, STAR and SEAL, or the first dragon the Vale has seen in three hundred years will grow up wild.

Each book stands on its own. Read the three in any order.

A small black stone, shaped like an egg, sits in a hollow at the back of a brick furnace where two old bricks have crumbled away, above a bed of glowing coals, while a boy reaches in with a long iron rake.

A frosty tower courtyard at dawn: a huge cloud of steam explodes out of a wooden bucket beside the well, water splashing over the rim around a black egg-shaped stone. — The first frost, and a stone that boils a bucket of well water.

Where it happens

The tower above Wend, its furnace and its stillroom, and the sky over the whole Vale. Places from this book are marked with the dragon on the map of the Vale.

Where it crosses the other two

The three Tales of Wending Vale happen in the same valley, in the same autumn. If you spot a friend from another book walking past in this one, you're not imagining it.

Not Till Seventeen

Listen for the night mail's horn, three notes rising, on the Thornbridge road. Lauren and her cousin Brie are never far from it.

The Song in the Cloth

Zachary grew up at the abbey by the river. When he goes back to the record room, Lainey is there with a book on her knees and a crochet hook going.

See how the three stories line up in One autumn, three stories, and who turns up where in Who's who.

Coming soon

The Dragonwarden's Apprentice isn't out yet. When it is, the links to buy the ebook, the paperback and the audiobook will be here.