Rattlers

Joren Baskel counted grain, not glory. Eleven years a quartermaster, he was the best Drift-Binder the Dominion had ever produced - the rare soul who could hold a hundred suits of empty, ancestral plate steady in his mind without breaking a sweat. War was never supposed to be his problem to solve. Then a Cascade Snap kills the general in front of him, and the arithmetic of command falls, by pure accident, into Joren's hands. He's never Weaved more than six threads in real combat. He's now responsible for every soldier holding the pass - and for the mountain above it, where a volcano that's slept for a thousand years is waking up, and giving its dead back. They're not monsters. They're farmers, smiths, and shepherds who remember exactly which field was theirs, and they want it back. As Claimant villagers rise from the ash to reclaim land the Dominion has hoarded for generations, Joren has to learn to Weave real combat under fire, bargain a bond with a fell, grief-hungry Veilwing, and decide whether holding the line means robbing the dead of the very armor that was theirs to begin with. Rattlers is a gritty, ash-and-iron military fantasy about the true cost of command - where the enemy has a better legal claim than you do, and the only honest way through is to count the cost, out loud, every single time. Perfect for readers of Joe Abercrombie, Miles Cameron, and Django Wexler.