Iron Baronies

Draven Holt is nineteen years old, an orphan, and the longest-serving Edge in Barony Tenne's history — denied his sworn rank for three years by a First Blade who won't explain why. He can heat his blade, move faster than human limits should allow, and has a white tiger that fights beside him in the dark. None of this has a name in the world he lives in.



When a dead stretch of land called the Ashfields is discovered to sit above the largest oil deposit in the Reaches, seven Barons who have maintained an uneasy peace for thirty years move toward war simultaneously. The oil doesn't just fuel weapons and machinery — near a raw deposit, a mage's power becomes effectively limitless. Extended exposure raises that ceiling permanently. Whoever controls the Ashfields doesn't just win this war. They win the next five.



Draven's Baron — Harric Tenne, seventy-one, the most reluctant man in the conflict — shares a border with the Ashfields and cannot stay out of what is coming no matter how carefully he tries. Draven is sent to the border, then to a secret meeting, then to a council of all seven Barons, doing things at each stop that his rank doesn't authorize and his judgment requires. The war begins properly when the council fails. The Ashfields ignite. The mages collide near the crude and become something the Reaches has never seen. And Draven has to decide what the Iron Word actually means to him — whether it is the ladder he always thought it was, or something he has to earn differently than he planned.



The book is about power and what it costs. About a young man who wanted a rank and discovered he wanted something harder.