If Not For The Barrens

Ailey doesn’t know her plan is doomed before it starts. 

It’s a straightforward plan, if long. Escape the Plains and carve out her own path. A path with some adventure, sure coin, and enough distance from her family to build a life of her choosing. A plan without room for distractions.

Distractions like romance. 

Ailey’s spent enough of her twenty-three years hoping for a man to show interest in her, and now, she’s quite settled against it. Not worth the risk, really, given how many couples fall apart.

Whereas University Academia Fortuna, a premier school for magic in the shining capital city of Altrania, is a sure step forward. A giant leap from the quiet sadness of the Plains. An expensive one, yes, with years of study and heaps of work, but worth it, for a magi can find good work anywhere in Ocrea. And there’s the beauty of it, the wonder and privilege of channeling magic. 

She's getting top marks in casts and magical theory, managing classes alongside work, earning enough coin to send home to her family and save a bit, besides. She hardly sleeps, but otherwise, it's all going to plan.

Except for Evren. Kind, quiet, intelligent, rather well-built Evren.

It’s cleaner if she avoids him. Others are interested in him. No one would want to be bound to someone with a family difficult as hers. Romance has ruined better women than her, left them with children to feed and hearts broken. 

And he surely cannot keep enduring her stubbornness, and uncertainty, and tendency to ramble when she’s out of sorts. Always with his lopsided smile and endearingly awkward silences and increasingly open admiration. 

She manages to step round him, for a time. Past other men - apparently living in Altrania means a deluge of unsought romance - and her father and stepmother’s best efforts to see her betrothed. 

Until she cannot step around the truth of her own heart. 

Her plans look better, then, shared with him. Fuller. A garden he would tend. A bookshelf she would fill. A home whose threshold was familiar with the steps of family, and friends, and perhaps children, one day. One filled with laughter, magic, and above all with each other. 

This would have been the sum total of it, in any other land. Any place not tied to the Barrens, not surrounded by the Wandering Darkness. He loves her without reserve, and she him, in spite of all her fears, and they would have been happier than she thought possible. 

But this is Ocrea. 

A land of required recompenses, unknown grief, looming darkness. A place of careful sacrifice and controlled magic. For the good of all.

And Ailey cannot know that every step forward in her brilliant plan is a step closer to Evren’s undoing - and her own. 

The first novel in the Barrens Trilogy