The Ancients

In a future so distant that an earlier climate catastrophe has faded into legend, the world has slipped back to something like the fifteenth century, with small farming families scratching a living at the edges of a recovering wilderness. When their parents fail to return from a fishing trip, three siblings, the steady older Leerit, the watchful Maren, and the small boy Kushim, abandon their lakeside farm and set out to survive on their own. Their journey interweaves with two others, their mother Lilah, captured by raiders and sold into labor, and Cyrus, a young scribe thrust into power in a dying coastal city ruled by an unforgiving emperor. Larison binds the threads together around the question of which stories a people pass down, and which ones they let die.