When raiders burn his valley a third time, a thirteen-year-old orphan does the only thing left to try: he climbs the one hill the fires never reached, and asks Heaven, plainly, for help — the way his mother taught him to ask a debtor for exactly what's owed, and not a coin more.
Something answers. A stranger who never gives her name presses an unkillable sword into his hands, tells him only what it's called — Valeria — and is gone. It ends the raid within the hour. It also, unfortunately, works exactly as advertised: the blade judges the hand that holds it, and refuses everyone who wants it for the wrong reasons — including, in front of two entire royal courts, a king.
He never wanted a legend. He wanted his family's ledger balanced, and to be left alone by whoever decided a goatherd's son now owed the world more than that. But a sword that only answers an honest heart isn't a thing crowns forgive easily, and over the next thirty years — a stolen inheritance, a war built on one rich man's wounded pride, a princess who believed in him nine years before she ever met him, and a hired killer who couldn't find anything in him worth killing — he keeps having to answer the same question he never asked to be handed in the first place.
He's not the only one keeping score. Somewhere above the whole affair, an observer from somewhere considerably further away than Heaven is filing reports on him that get steadily less careful, and steadily less honest about staying uninvolved.
