The emperor of Annur is assassinated and his three children are scattered. Kaden, the heir, has spent eight years in a remote monastery learning a discipline whose purpose nobody has explained to him. Valyn is training with the Kettral, elite soldiers who go into battle on giant hawks.
The monastery thread is the better one. Years of apparently pointless chores turn out to be the training, which is an old idea executed patiently here.
The Kettral material is more conventional military fantasy, and the third sibling gets noticeably less room than the other two.
Solid first book in a trilogy. I did not continue, which says more about the queue than the book.
Read September 2022.
