The frontier is vast. The cities are hungry. And the Balance between good and evil — the force that keeps the world from tipping into catastrophe — is running out of time.

THE UNSETTLED LANDS is a five-novel epic fantasy series set in a world that has outgrown its medieval past and arrived at something like the American frontier — vast and lawless and full of people trying to build lives at the edge of everything. Steam engines are replacing horse-drawn carts. Corporations are replacing kingdoms. And a king in a boardroom is quietly building the kind of power that cannot be argued with.

Into this world rides Ben Croft: middle-aged, compact, weathered by twenty years on the frontier road. A hedge wizard by trade and by choice — the lowest tier of magic-user considered fully independent — he has spent two decades helping where he can and moving on before anyone can ask him to stay. He has built his life around the conviction that small good, done faithfully, is enough.

Then he meets Cody.

The boy is fourteen, an orphan with no history and no memory of one. He has been living above a livery stable in a prairie town called Harrow’s Ford, doing his work and asking precise questions and watching the world with the specific attention of someone who has learned not to need too much from any one source. When a water trough lights up blue-green at his bored glance, the town sends for a hedge wizard.

Ben’s assessment takes three minutes. The boy’s talent is not hedge wizard territory. It is not even wizard territory. What Ben is looking at, trying not to show it on his face, is something he has only heard described.

He takes the boy on anyway.