The Dragon's Path (The Dagger and the Coin, Book 1)
Daniel Abraham's five-book Dagger and the Coin series opens with The Dragon's Path and follows a rotating cast including Cithrin bel Sarcour, a teenage ward of a banking house who is smuggled across a border with the bank's wealth as a war breaks out. Abraham writes epic fantasy at the ground level, spending as much time on ledgers, letters of credit, and grain shipments as on swordplay, and his central conflict grows from a spider goddess cult that turns political speech into weaponized certainty. The prose is patient and character-driven, and the series has been praised for treating finance and administration as the real levers of power in an imagined world. Patrick McKenzie has recommended the series as the fantasy that finally takes banking seriously, and readers who have worked in payments or credit find its details unusually well observed.
What you might want to know about The Dragon's Path (The Dagger and the Coin, Book 1)
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
An epic fantasy series where the real magic is banking, and a young ward of a merchant house has to save her caravan from a war spreading across the continent.
McKenzie has praised the series on his blog and Twitter as the rare fantasy that treats banking, credit, and financial risk with the seriousness they deserve, and has recommended it to readers curious about how medieval finance actually worked.
The Dragon's Path is book one of five, and the series is meant to be read in order. Abraham finished the arc in 2016 with The Spider's War.
The Dragon's Path (The Dagger and the Coin, Book 1) was written by Daniel Abraham, published in 2011 by Orbit.
The Dragon's Path (The Dagger and the Coin, Book 1) is 592 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Dragon's Path (The Dagger and the Coin, Book 1) takes most readers 9 to 13 hours to finish.
The Dragon's Path (The Dagger and the Coin, Book 1) is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.