Violet Sorrengail expected a quiet life among the scribes, cataloguing history in the archives of Navarre. Instead, her iron-willed mother—the kingdom's most feared general—orders her into the Riders Quadrant at Basgiath War College, where cadets bond with dragons or die trying. Smaller and more physically fragile than the warriors around her, Violet is given almost no chance of surviving the first day, let alone graduating.
To live, she'll have to outthink opponents who could snap her in half, earn the respect of a dragon that could incinerate her on a whim, and navigate the lethal politics of a college where ambition is settled with blades. Chief among the threats is Xaden Riorson, the brooding, dangerous wingleader whose father was executed for leading a rebellion against Violet's mother—giving him every reason to want her dead.
But as the war beyond Navarre's borders grows harder to ignore and the kingdom's defenses begin to fail, Violet starts to suspect that the leadership is hiding the truth about what's really happening on the front lines. The first book in Rebecca Yarros's Empyrean series, Fourth Wing pairs a deadly dragon-rider academy with a slow-burning, high-heat romance and a mystery that reframes everything Violet thought she knew.