Stronghold

The opening volume of Melanie Rawn's Dragon Star trilogy picks up nine years after the events of Sunrunner's Fire, in the same world as her Dragon Prince books. High Prince Rohan and his sorceress wife Sioned have spent that peace building schools and a scriptorium and watching their son Pol come into his own — until an unknown army of barbarian invaders sweeps across the continent with no clear origin or motive, bearing down hardest on Rohan's beloved Desert.

As Rohan and Pol are driven into flight across their own homeland, they discover the invaders share a deep, specific fear of dragons — a clue to fighting back. Meanwhile Andry, the ambitious head of the Sunrunners, sees the invasion as the fulfillment of visions he has long dreaded, and turns to forbidden sorcery in a desperate bid to destroy the enemy threatening to wipe out his people entirely.

Blending political intrigue, dragon lore, and the Sunrunner magic system established in the earlier trilogy, Stronghold opens a war whose stakes are nothing less than survival.