In Avondale, lineage determines everything—your status, your opportunities, even the colors you’re allowed to wear. And seventeen-year-old Kadey has none. An orphan raised as a castle servant with no family name, she has spent her life knowing exactly where she belongs: at the bottom.
That begins to change when Donovan, a soldier-in-training, starts courting her, giving Kadey a chance for the family and belonging she has always wanted. Then she overhears a plot to ambush Avondale’s next military advance—one Donovan will take part in.
But someone like Kadey isn’t worth listening to, so her warnings are dismissed. With the prince and his soldiers marching toward an ambush, she refuses to stand by while Donovan—and the future she imagined with him—are taken from her. If no one in Avondale will listen, she’ll have to leave the kingdom and find someone who will believe her.
Her search for help carries her farther than she ever imagined, across dangerous seas and into a kingdom where magic is real. Her journey brings her face-to-face with knights, fairies, ogres, and even a dragon as she searches for someone willing to help save Avondale. Along the way, Kadey finds something she never expected: a world that doesn’t measure her worth by the lineage she lacks.
But the farther Kadey travels, the more she begins to question the future she has been trying to save. And when she returns home with help, she may have to confront something harder than stopping an ambush.
Kadey may realize that the life she has been fighting for was never what made her worthy—and that she was never the one found wanting.
