Free the Darkness

Free the Darkness opens at a hidden fortress on the edge of the kingdom of Ashai, where a young man named Rezkin has been raised since childhood by a council of masters who have trained him in every weapon, language, and discipline they could devise — under a code they call the Rules and Skills. He has never met a stranger, never seen a city, and never had a friend. When the fortress is overrun and his masters are killed, he steps out into the ordinary world for the first time, charged by a dying king with a quest he does not entirely understand.

What follows is part road-and-tavern adventure, part culture-shock comedy of manners. Rezkin is staggeringly competent and almost completely socially illiterate, and the people he falls in with — a young noblewoman, a band of travelers, a couple of unlucky guards — spend most of the book trying to work out who or what he actually is. Kade’s first novel is the foundation of the whole series, introducing the cast, the world, and the Rezkin-shaped gravitational pull that the next six books orbit around.