Aden

Where It Begins: Chapter 1, Life in the Village

The book opens in a crowded market in Airovale. A farmer's daughter named Kateryna presses an apple into Aden's hand and whispers two words, na dobro: for good. He can't tell whether she is offering a blessing or a bargain. What he does with the apple a few streets later, and the windblown poster that follows, sets the whole story moving.

By nightfall he is walking up the gangplank of the Nereid, taken on by a skeptical captain as a coal hand who will also keep the ship fed with his bow. It is the first time he has stepped aboard a ship as crew rather than a stowaway.

Read it in Life in the Village, watch it as Episode 1, or hear the chapter's score in the soundtrack.

An Island That Keeps Accounts

The Nereid joins a fleet crossing the compass-spinning magnetic sea to the Crescent Islands, where every crew wants copper and half of them want something older. Then the storm comes, and the ship that was meant to carry them home is carried somewhere else entirely: Canyon Myst, an island where none should be, and a village that seems oddly eager to see its visitors leave.

It is here that Thalos, the fae elder, shakes Aden's hand a moment longer than anyone else's, and says something quiet that he will turn over for the rest of the book. While his crewmates fill their chests, Aden is the one who asks what gold is worth on an island.

Aden and Kira

In Chapter 7 the elder pairs him with his own daughter, Kira, for a hunt neither of them asked for. After that the story gets complicated quickly: a warning he has to carry back to the ship, a challenge that can't be refused, a long night with his fate in other people's hands, and a doorway older than the island. How much he is willing to give up for her is the question the final chapters turn on.

Aden and the Law of Exchange

Aden begins with almost nothing, which makes him the character with the most to learn about the Law of Exchange. A kindness given freely, an island whose every gift carries a price, a crew who treat gratitude as something to be spent: he sees each of them differently from the men around him, and it costs him.

The Magic page lists Aden and Kira among the saga's clearest examples of the Law at work. See The Law in Action.