R. John Walker
The Round seen from a private box: a carved rail in the foreground, a raised platform of stained grey stone below with two figures facing each other, tiers packed with spectators, four shafts of light from high windows.
The Round, from the Adon box

Book One

The Bramble King

Six hundred people in the Round saw Daniel Adon step onto the Stone to face his father that morning.

He was the golden child, his father's heir, and he had come as champion for the House accusing Judge Gideon Adon of murder and demanding justice by the only means left to them: trial by combat. By the end of the hour the Ruling Judge of the Seventy was dead — lawfully, publicly, at the hand of his own son.

His younger brother, Caleb, was in the Round that day, seated with the rest of his family. When Daniel moved to strike, he half rose to shout a warning, and the shout died in his throat. He sat back down.

Now an old man in his seventies, he is writing it all down: how his brother came to kill their father, how the Reach, where kings had been outlawed for a thousand years, let one rise, and what it cost the one man who set out to stop him.

Coming 2027

Notify me
Every part of that room was working as it was designed to work. What it was designed to do was let this happen. The Bramble King, Chapter One
A vast, weathered starship in orbit above a clouded world, a small craft beside it for scale.
The Selah “Every rebellion in the Reach’s history has died in the same way. Somebody finds where it lives and destroys it. I would like to not live anywhere.” Caleb
In an orchard, a small fair-haired boy sits in the dirt beside a wrecked machine, reaching into its wiring and looking up at his older brother, who stands over him in a grey-blue uniform.
The orchard at the Alhambra Two brothers, before.

The trilogy

The Brothers

“But a weave knows its own. The live armor learns the touch of those who are allowed, and my father’s had known my brother as a child, had felt him climb into a lap and be carried and be loved.” Caleb Adon
“He prosecuted the guilty. That is the horror of it, and it is the reason he was so difficult to fight against for so long. He was right every time about what those men had done.” Caleb Adon, on his brother Daniel
  1. Book One The Bramble King Coming 2027
  2. Book Two Rule of the Seventy In progress
  3. Book Three The Judgment of Jotham In progress