Leonarth Lucien

Leonarth is thirteen, and has spent every one of those years at Saint-Spire Abbey without ever quite belonging to it. He remembers arriving when he was five. He remembers nothing before that — only a threadbare blanket, the scent of smoke and lilies, and the ghost of a hand against his forehead.

He is quiet in the way watchful children are quiet. He reads people too easily, feels their unspoken hurts as if they were his own, and has learned to keep that strangeness to himself. The abbey has been kind to him. It has also, he is beginning to realize, been keeping something from him.

Then the mist at the edge of the grounds starts to call, an old key surfaces where no key should be, and the orderly world he thought he understood begins, very quietly, to come apart.

His one true anchor is Mattheon — a few years older, the closest thing he has to a brother — and together they have weathered every winter the abbey has thrown at them.

Some children are simply raised. Leonarth, it turns out, was hidden — and the things hidden with him are starting to wake.