Kelvara, Series Two
Uncharted Skills
A map that fills itself in, a road that was not there yesterday, and a man who fully intends to get away with it.
Book One out now
What it is
Same world, sharper edges
Kelvara is bigger than one valley and one apothecary. Uncharted Skills follows a cartographer working the edges of the map, where the surveys stop and the guild's confidence starts running out.
It keeps what Sold as Weeds is made of. A class nobody rates, a system with a filing habit, and progression that costs something real. What it does not keep is the cosy. This one is faster, further from home and considerably more dangerous, and its pleasures are exploration, hazardous ground, hidden things worth money and a class you can watch grow teeth.
The two series share a world and nothing else you are required to know. Either one is a fine place to start.
Out now
Book One
Wrongways
[Mapped routes: 0][Viable routes observed: 6][Safe routes observed: 1][Notation: these are not the same category.]
Corin Vale charges double for the honest route. The dishonest route is worse.
He is a Line-Reader. He sees where roads actually go, which in the Wrongways is not where anyone has drawn them. The system that grades his work is called Verdict. It answers exactly the question it was asked, it volunteers nothing, and it has opinions about his life choices.
The Historical Office is paying him to take three wagons west to an abandoned watch station, where a landslip has uncovered something old. The permit is red-sealed, the fee is good, and a rival salvage crew is already on the road.
Then every route home is lost. Fifteen people, six mules and three wagons are standing on top of a city that was cut off from the world on purpose. There is no road out. Corin is going to have to make one, and every step will cost something.
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Book Two
Waywrights
Someone else is making roads. And they have noticed Corin Vale.
Corin got fifteen people out of the Wrongways alive. It cost him a leg, and it earned him a fee and his first road. Now a stranger's pin is turning up in the ground, closer every night, cut with a maker's mark nobody should still be using.
Ilse Wendt pays in brass pins. She needs a Line-Reader to follow her mother's trail west, into country the official maps say is empty. Out there, roads have been wiped so hard the ground goes blank and hungry. Whole villages walk paths they can no longer remember. And a polite surveyor from the Office keeps asking exactly the right questions.
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Book Three
Unwalked Lines
The map says his road belongs to someone else.
Someone has drawn a new line over the road Corin built and put another man's name on it, and the ground is starting to believe it. If he wants his road back, he has to go where the lines are made: Kellam.
In Kellam, copper plates decide what the world becomes. Streets harden where they are engraved. Towns rise where nobody has ever walked. And the Order's cleaners erase whatever disagrees with the paper, from roads to faces.
The class
Line-Reader
It starts as a way of seeing and ends as a way of changing what is there. Corin does not level by fighting. He levels by walking into ground nobody has charted, surviving whatever stopped the last person, and fixing what he learned into a map of his own.
Shows the routes that actually go somewhere. A viable path is not necessarily a safe path, and Verdict is careful to say so.
What the ground used to be. Old roads under new ones, and the reasons somebody stopped using them.
A short burst of movement along a line he can clearly see. Distance grows as the map does.
Weaknesses in ground, buildings and wards, wherever their construction forms a line worth reading.
A mark only his party can see and follow. Each one needs a pin, and pins are hard to come by.
Two skills used together do things neither does alone. Verdict recommends doing it on purpose.
Where it goes
Four books, and a question worth the trouble
Seeing lines. Using them. Breaking them. Reading what the land used to be, and finally forcing one version of a place over another.
Getting away with it stops working somewhere in the middle, which is rather the point. By then Corin is not looking at old ruins, he is looking at lies that are still being maintained, and at borders and histories that somebody decided on. The series ends on the question underneath all of it. Is the true world the one that was there first, or the one people are living in now?
The Quiet Cup
Hear the day each book lands
One letter when there is news, and never when there is not. Release days, early chapters, and the occasional plant with something to say.
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