InNate

Everybody knows the eight schools of magic. Everybody can read the Runes they’re written in.

Everybody except Nate.

Plucked from his family’s orchard and sponsored to Gressus Halls, the kingdoms’s university of magic, eighteen-year-old Nathaniel Kersward arrives three weeks late, two years younger than his classmates, and unable to read a single spell. The Runes shift and their formulas collapse. The forms (there are so many forms) don’t have a box for whatever he is.

But Nate can taste an illusion going stale. Enchantment is music in his bones, and a ward’s weakness is the skin of an overripe orange. Magic speaks to him in ways nobody has studied and no one, least of all Nate, knows what to do about it.

With a year to prove he’s not a risk, Nate will need help: a rabbitfolk classmate with immaculate notes, a gnome who wants to measure everything, a changeling nobody notices, a homesick giant, a librarian who hires him on a whim and a café owner who believes most problems shrink over a warm dinner.

Because Gressus Halls has never taught a student like Nate. And the best teacher’s learn from those they teach.