The Emerged World

The Emerged World has been losing for forty years. The Tyrant holds most of it, the fammin — creatures grown for the purpose — hold the rest, and the free lands are down to a handful. Nihal is the last half-elf, blue-haired and violent, raised by an armourer in the Land of the Wind, and when her tower falls she does the only thing she knows how to do: goes to be trained as a Dragon Knight so that she can kill the man responsible. Licia Troisi wrote the Chronicles of the Emerged World — Nihal of the Land of the Wind, Sennar's Mission and The Last Talisman — as the opening of a much larger Italian fantasy cycle, with further sequences following other characters across the same continent. The tone is young, fast and unromantic about war: grief that turns into rage and stays there, a heroine who is not especially likeable and is never asked to be, and magic with a price attached to every use. Read the Chronicles in order, beginning with Nihal of the Land of the Wind — the trilogy is one continuous account of a girl becoming a soldier, and then having to work out what to become after that.