Tarin Rook picks fruit in an orchard his family will never own. He goes to the Choosing to watch, because watching costs nothing — and walks away bonded to a Stormscale, the rarest dragon in Vax Caldera, bonded to royalty since before the Succession Wars.

The Crown can't kill him for it. So it makes him a lord instead, and sends him to the Academy on the Rim, where the sons and daughters of the great houses have trained since childhood, and where all of them know what he was a season ago.

The trials will try to break him. His classmates will finish the job.

But a dragon chose a boy from the dirt — and once a thing like that happens where people can see it, everything has to change.

Book one of Dragon Riders of Zerath.