Airget Lámh

AN ANCIENT SOVEREIGNTY IS WAKING.

Lieutenant Séan Devlin came home from Lithuania with three silver marks burned into his right palm, a memory of impossible things bowing to him in the dark, and a sentence in a language he should not have understood.

The king is not crowned.

He is a soldier of the Irish Army Ranger Wing. He deals in what can be observed, assessed, and acted upon. But the marks do not heal the way burns heal. The stories his grandfather told him in a kitchen in Connemara are turning out to be reports rather than tales. And something patient and very old has been thinning the sacred places of Ireland, one site at a time, working steadily westward toward the Hill of Tara - and toward him.

To hold the line he will need a seer who has been tracking the enemy for two years, a trauma surgeon who has spent her whole career preparing for a patient like him, a history teacher in Derry carrying a light he cannot explain, and the soldiers who have always trusted him with their lives.

He will need to become what his grandfather spent thirty years, quietly and without once explaining why, preparing him to be.

And when the enemy finally turns to look at him, it will not ask whether he is strong enough. It will ask something harder - whether the certainty he has lived inside his entire life was ever really his own.

Airget Lámh is the first book of the Devlin Trilogy: a mythic military fantasy of Irish legend, sovereign power, and the quiet work of holding the world together.

"The silver hand was honest."