Kindling

The war is over, and the kindlings, elite teenage soldiers whose magic came at the cost of their own bodies and years, have been cast adrift. Their power is outlawed, their balar weapons reduced to relics sold as souvenirs, their skills unwanted in peacetime. When a small village comes under siege by bandits, seven kindlings are given one last chance to fight, and to reckon with who the war made them. Traci Chee, writing in the tradition of Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, follows a fractured group of young survivors as they confront their trauma, their pasts, and each other in a war-ravaged world built around this original magic system.