Stories by J. J. Coombe
One valley. One autumn. Three young people, each with their own adventure, and stories that cross the way roads do.
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.
Fifteen-year-old Lauren Hartley can drive four horses better than half the men on the Thornbridge road. She just isn't allowed to, not till seventeen. But someone is sabotaging her father's mail coach, the contract that keeps the family inn is on the line, and on the night the ridge catches fire, someone has to take the reins.
Twelve-year-old Lainey hardly ever speaks. She reads, she crochets, and she plays every instrument in the abbey. When a flood breaks open a wall that has been sealed for three hundred years, she finds knotted cords that turn out to be music, and a secret the Guild would rather burn.
Each book stands on its own. Read them in any order.
There is a valley where the river wends, with a village called Wend at the bottom of it, an old stone tower on the hill above, an abbey by the water, and a coaching inn at the crossroads where the night mail comes down off the moor at ten past three in the morning.
One autumn, three young people in that valley each had their own adventure. Their stories cross, the way roads do.
J. J. Coombe spent years as a paramedic, and now writes stories his children can see themselves in. He lives with his family somewhere a lot less dramatic than Wending Vale.