COMING SOON!

You’ve stood with Azaya on the Streets of Skelderheim.

You came across with her to East Bay, Maine. You’ve sat with her at Emera’s tavern as she loaded her plate for the third time, laughing, and you’ve spent nights out on the Central Expanse with her and her sister Rinna.

Now come with Azaya as she sets out on one more adventure. From East Bay, Maine, to Skelderheim, then a voyage, and finally back home to where it all began: The steppe of the Central Expanse, and the tribes.

From welcoming a new member of the family, to breathtaking new places, live for a little while once more in Azaya’s world, and experience it next to her one final time.

The series comes to a close with Azaya and the Seven Great Halls of the Orren-Kai, and it’s a whirlwind ride through the streets of Skelderheim and on the great plains of the Central Expanse. Join Azaya, Rinna, and all their sisters for one last book.

SYNOPSIS – No Spoilers.

Part One: East Bay

The book opens in a hospital in East Bay, Maine, where Charles paces a hallway while Azaya, Rinna, Keri, and Naanah wait with Todd for Anna to give birth. Hours later the four Kin-Sisters gather around the bed, lay their hands on the newborn, and name her. Azaya closes her eyes and the name comes to her: Zaara, Daughter of the Flame.

Zaara comes home to the mansion, and because the family talks over open two-way radios, the whole town hears. Visiting Day follows. Classmates, the Rotary Club, the Amateur Radio Club, the Friends of the Lighthouse, and Mrs. Sanderson’s gossip circle stream up the hill. Mr. Gregory, the high school science teacher, is recognized by Rinna as a crosser and a member of the Burentogor tribe. Danny asks to be kin-claimed by the sisters and is accepted. By evening, Azaya has a fire going in the pit, steaks are seasoned with spices from across the Portal, and the crossers and the Earth-siders sort themselves without anyone naming it.

A few days later, Todd takes the girls to Tawnyberry Farms. Rinna rides the big farm horses, then rides with a woman named Taanda, trading trick riding and archery until the fields stop working to watch. Taanda brings the group into the woods, where dozens of yurts sit hidden among the trees. This is the Hidden Tribes of the Forest, a tribe living inside East Bay. At night meal, Keri and Naanah, who have never known their lineage, are claimed as daughters of the tribe. Azaya gives the feeling a name: World-Duality, home in two places at once.

The family’s attention then turns to the Inventor. Myles reaches Charles over the radio from his own time, with Erasmus the librarian beside him, and what he says does not line up with what the family knows. Charles maps the divergences with colored rocks across the library: Naaya sent forward through time, Azaya on one side of the split, Anna on the other, and Rinna somewhere in the middle. Rinna argues that every divergence has a constant and an echo, and that she may be the constant rather than the echo. Azaya says out loud what the family has been circling for years, that she and Rinna bend reality around themselves, and that this is the simpler answer.

In town, the sisters follow the smell of tobacco into McDonald’s Tobacco and Spirits and meet Kaanta McDonald, a Partathian crosser. He closes his shop, brings out a book, and tells them plainly what they are. The Altay escort the dying to their places in the Seven Halls. He also tells them they have put something out of order, and it must be put back. Sayaana confirms it, and asks Kaanta to come to dinner with his book.

That dinner is the turn of Part One. Greg and Sally learn what their neighbors are. Kaanta reads from his book, and the sisters walk him through their timeline notes. Anna suggests the orreries themselves are off. Kaanta, working it through, realizes that Sayaana is the echo, not Rinna. Sayaana has known. She tells Todd that Naaya has been found and her own work is finished, asks her son to release her soul to the Altay, and fades from the table, calling the Altay and the Chosen as she goes.

Todd grieves hard and works harder. Three weeks past the day Anna was due back in Skelderheim, he finally walks into the Annex, and Azaya gets him moving. The family crosses, with Zaara in Todd’s arms, and Mel and Danny cross for the first time.

Part Two: The Harrik’s Merchant Galleon

Skelderheim has moved only one night while the family lost months, and the sisters work out the time slip over grilled cheese and yak steak. A memorial dinner is held at Brell and Emera’s tavern. Mel is walked through Merchant’s Ward and the Underways, and Danny is reunited with Micha, whose tavern now serves Myles’s Burgers.

At Zaara’s Celebration Day, the city turns out for Orra-Kai’s daughter. The sisters slip down into the Underways and bring back Hataan, a ten-winter-old from a stall family, and claim her as a sister with her parents’ consent. Todd ties shawls on each girl and names what each one is to him. Afterward, Hataan learns what the claim costs, as people on the street stop the sisters to ask the Line for favors, blessings, and escorts for their dead.

Then Todd and Sella bring an offer from Harrik: seven berths aboard his galleon for a southern coffee run. The parents agree, the girls are outfitted at Hallveig and Grimm’s with seabags, kits, and waxed cloaks, and they board the his ship as working shiphands.

The voyage is the spine of Part Two. Sella teaches navigation with maps and compasses. Naanah learns the crow’s nest and how to call what she sees. Emata and Batta work lamp oil through every deck. Azaya and Rinna cook in the galley. Keri finds that her mind works like Todd’s and maps a full cargo hold before a crate comes aboard. At Gortha, Harrik walks them through the math of what he pays, what he sells for, and what he keeps.

Faced with counting errors on the plank, the sisters rebuild the intake process into a two-caller system with marked tens and a fixed final count. Harrik names it Triple-Entry Intake and declares their count final. At Tennes they run it flawlessly through hundreds of crates, catch a shortage the adults missed, and are rewarded with coin and a day off, which they spend swimming with porpoises and then cooking night meal for the entire crew.

At Bethsatta, Rinna finds an error in Harrik’s books with her bead counter, and an innkeeper turns the group away for traveling with Hunters and Children of the Light. On the street outside, Harrik kneels and kin-claims all seven girls as his own. A second inn, run quietly by crossers, welcomes them. Over the following days the sisters take apart Harrik’s bookkeeping and rebuild it, then run the current voyage through the new system and show him a profit of 332,116 coin. At Rannar he pays each of them a bonus that leaves them stunned, and the group takes shore leave to shop.

Then the wind dies. The ship sits becalmed in dead waters, rationing begins, and the crew fishes and makes repairs while the sisters row a boat out for an afternoon. The breeze that ends the calm brings a storm, and the ship rides it out through the night.

The Dawn Trader comes home loud. Harrik fires a sixty-gun rolling salute off both sides as the galleon rounds the breakers, then unfurls Orra-Kai’s colors, a blue sail with six gold constellations, for the first time. The parents watch their daughters run the final count on the dock, and at payday Harrik hands each girl a black silk bag with a note and a gift large enough that Yanta says they could live the rest of their lives without working.

Part Three: Skelderheim and the Road Back

Winter closes the city in. The sisters spend night-sets in the Underways, in the karukka, and at the mansion, and their mothers begin to worry about what the girls are becoming. Charles sits with both sides and tells the mothers plainly that the girls are already operating at a level no one can supervise.

Azaya goes home with Lenne to the apartment with the potbelly stove and finishes her first book, a third-person account of her years in the city, titled The Streets of Skelderheim. Word goes out over the radio, and the manuscript is passed around at Utaan’s Fish Fry, where Erasmus reads a chapter aloud to the whole restaurant and asks for a copy for the library.

The parents then learn how far the businesses have gone. The sisters have bought a warehouse where street kids sleep warm and eat whether they have coin or not, food stalls, shops, and more warehouses for incoming ships. Drowning in paperwork, they found the Owl Sisters Management Company and hire children as bookkeepers, paying adult wages with quarterly bonuses. Hataan and Naanah recruit Yoba and Denne out of the Underways. Erasmus, Klebber, and finally Harrik become clients. With Charles, Todd, and Harrik sitting in, the sisters interview and select a buyer, a haggler, and an operations manager, and step back from running it themselves.

When spring comes, they load the karukka and turn out onto the Merchant’s Corridor for two night-sets on the steppe, just the seven of them. They stop at stalls along the road, sleep on the roof under the stars, and reach the rise above Kira’s camp, only to find that Orra-Kai’s caravan and all of their parents have been following them the entire way. Kira meets them, the tribe swarms them, and the nine girls end up in the shallows of the pool where Azaya first met Rinna, catching crayfish. That evening they walk the overgrown path to the Nannanta clearing for night meal of yak, root vegetables, and buttered bread, and Azaya sits among them and feels, plainly, at home.

The rest is omitted to preserve the plot

BOOK RELEASE: OCTOBER 21, 2026