Wraithbound

Table of Contents Prologue Book One Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Book Two Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Book Three Chapter Thirty-Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight Chapter Thirty-Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty-One Chapter Forty-Two Chapter Forty-Three Chapter Forty-Four Chapter Forty-Five Chapter Forty-Six Chapter Forty-Seven Chapter Forty-Eight Chapter Forty-Nine Chapter Fifty Chapter Fifty-One Epilogue WRAITHBOUND TIM AKERS Wraithbound Tim Akers EPIC FANTASY BY A RISING STAR OF FANTASYSince he was a boy, Rae Kelthannis has dreamed of being a stormbinder like his father, with an air elemental stitched into the fabric of his soul and the winds of heaven at his command. Those dreams died when his father, through no fault of his own, fell into disgrace and was banned by the justicars of the Iron Council. The family fled to the edge of the Ordered World, to live in fear in the shadow of encroaching Chaos.When Rae defies his father’s orders and attempts to stitch an air elemental to his soul, he instead binds himself to a mysterious wraith. That’s when things get complicated and the world starts to fall apart around him. Literally. BOOKS by TIM AKERS Knight Watch Knight Watch Valhellions The Horns of Ruin The Burn Cycle Heart of Veridon Dead of Veridon The Hallowed War The Pagan Night The Iron Hound The Winter Vow The Spiritbinder Saga Wraithbound Wraithbound This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. Copyright © 2023 Tim Akers All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. A Baen Books Original Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471 www.baen.com ISBN: 978-1-9821-9255-6 eISBN: 978-1-62579-907-4 Cover art by Jeff Brown First printing, April 2023 Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Akers, Tim, 1972- author. Title: Wraithbound / Tim Akers. Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Publishing Enterprises, [2023] | Series: The Spiritbinder Saga Identifiers: LCCN 2022058005 (print) | LCCN 2022058006 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982192556 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781625799074 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Novels. | Fantasy fiction. Classification: LCC PS3601.K48 W73 2023 (print) | LCC PS3601.K48 (ebook) | DDC 813.6—dc23/eng/20221208 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058005 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058006 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Electronic version by Baen Books www.baen.com To Jennifer We Stand Together Prologue There was a storm on the horizon. Rae could feel it in his bones, and deep in the hollow spaces of his soul. Mother insisted that was nonsense, that Rae couldn’t possibly soulsense at his age. But Rae knew. The skies outside the window of their brick cottage were clear as sunlight, and the breeze that drifted through the boughs of the pear tree in the garden was as gentle as a butterfly’s kiss. Bees buzzed through the nodding heads of the stand of sunflowers that bordered the garden wall. There was no sign of weather, other than the twinge in the middle of his chest. It was going to rain. Big. And Rae wanted to watch his father kill the storm. He snuck out of the house while Mother was trying to put his younger sister, Lalette, down for her afternoon nap. If Rae had tried to leave earlier, La would have tried to tag along, and stormbinding wasn’t the business of six-year-olds. Father’s station was a short, squat stone building at the top of a hill overlooking Hadroy House. To get there, Rae had to travel down the long lane of servants’ cottages, wind his way through the herb garden, then skim the stables and make his way over a short berm that shielded the main house from the working half of the manor. It would have been more direct to go through the formal garden, but for the last six weeks the grassy fields that surrounded the garden had been occupied by soldiers. Rae was fascinated by their uniforms, and the long muskets they stacked in little pyramids, and the smell of gunpowder when they practiced their lines, but the guards had a habit of nabbing him and asking a lot of questions. Rae didn’t want to risk missing the storm because he was stuck in some officer’s tent, explaining for the hundredth time that his father worked for the baron. Rae was skirting along the edge of the stables when a figure caught his eye. It was Yveth Maelys, another spiritbinder in the baron’s service, though Rae had no idea what the man did. None of our business, Mother always said. Just like the soldiers, and the sudden renovations to the abandoned huntsman’s tower at the edge of the property, and Rassek Brant, the strange, dark man who had been at Baron Hadroy’s side for the last six months. None of our business. But Rae couldn’t help being curious. So he ducked behind an empty trough and watched Yveth make his way across the paddock. Yveth was a stormbinder, just like Rae’s dad, though the two men could not have been less alike. Where Tren Kelthannis was short and soft around the edges, with an academic tilt to his head and a wardrobe that ran toward silk and spots of ink, Yveth was tall and lean and severe. Though he knew Yveth was a stormbinder, he had never seen him help his father during the frequent storms, not even when the outer fields needed watering in the dry months of summer. All Yveth ever did was stalk around the