Useful things, built fair.

In the ninth year of Jìngpíng, in one thunderstorm, four children are born. Two of them are identical sons of the Empress. Twin heirs are an omen no throne survives, so she does the only thing she can think of to keep both of them alive: she sends one out of the palace in a basket, four hours old, and tells nobody for twenty-three years.

One boy grows up a Crown Prince, taught to stand very still while men bow to him. The other grows up nine days south in a river town, counting crates on a landing and learning to be unremarkable — with the family mark on the wrong shoulder, and a pull in his chest he has no words for.

A third child born that night is a daughter, in a sealed house, to a condemned widow. She is raised as a princess in the palace by the Emperor himself, and she is twenty years old before she begins to notice that the story she was given does not add up. Old stable ledgers. Three requisition dockets. Four words from an old woman in a lane. She pulls the thread, and it leads her onto a road along the Ling where real bandits are waiting.

Volume One of three. Parts One to Three — The Founding, The Childhood, and The Thread and the Hill. It ends the morning after that road, with a physician giving a household three findings and one instruction: do not tell her who she is.

She wakes on a straw mattress in a house by a willow, and she cannot see, and she cannot remember her name. The river family who took her in doesn't know who she is. She learns the house by its sounds, and learns to measure a storm by counting between the lightning and the thunder.

Nine days north, a war the court expected to win is coming apart. Orders arrive where they should not. A flank holds that should have broken. A Crown Prince survives what should have killed him — and a young man from the river town keeps riding north to rescue someone he has never met.

Volume Two of three, in three parts — The River Years, The War, and The Mountain — two stories running side by side until they meet in a cave above the river town, and forty-three days that change what everyone is willing to do.

Everything arrives at once. A household on the river loses its people one by one. A woman in the capital, doing arithmetic nobody else can see, decides there is no longer time to be careful — and moves against a princess with something worse than a lie: the truth. An old exchange in a sealed house, twenty-three years ago, witnessed by handmaidens who never understood what they saw.

You cannot lie to an Emperor. An Emperor cannot kill his own princess. So he takes everything from her instead and puts her out into the street, where nobody recognises her, and it rains.

And in a hall in front of the throne, ten men who all claim to be the Crown Prince are made to stand together, because there is one proof left and it is written on their shoulders.

Volume Three of three. Parts Seven to Nine — The House Comes Apart, The Proof and the Fall, and The Petition. It ends with a petition, a wedding, and an Emperor who has to pause before he can finish saying my little princess.

Buck never wanted to be a hero. He just wanted to finish his science project and find the nerve to talk to Jenn, the green-eyed redhead who sat down at his table in the cafeteria. Then the ship came.

For weeks it had hung out past Jupiter, as big as a small moon, answering no one. The night it reached lunar orbit, raiders stormed the dome where Buck lived. The diamond rod he'd borrowed for his project drank their laser fire and became a glowing crystal sword. By morning his best friend was dead, and Jenn was gone.

A crate of soy carries Buck to Perm, a desert world ruled by a King and Queen who arrived “from the stars” fifteen years ago. Thrown in prison and called a crewb, the lowest animal on the planet, Buck finds an unlikely friend in B-Tonn, a giant with a terrible temper and a missing sister. When B-Tonn dies in his arms, he binds Buck with a blood vow: find her, or die trying.

Hunted for a thousand bentars and bound by customs he barely understands, the boy from the Moon becomes a legend the people call the Light Knight. But every step toward B-Tonn's sister leads closer to the palace, to the truth about the rulers from the stars, and to the girl he came to save.

Begun by hand in 1989 and finished in 2005, Perm is a fast-moving science-fiction adventure about loyalty, honor, and keeping your word when it costs everything. The story continues in The Book of Wars.