Darian's Tale (The Owl Trilogy)

About the Darian's Tale (The Owl Trilogy) series

Darian's Tale, often called the Owl trilogy after its titles, follows Darian Firkin, an orphaned apprentice mage on Valdemar's dangerous northern frontier, who accidentally triggers a magical mishap that draws hostile invaders toward his home village. Forced to flee into the wilderness, Darian is taken in by the Hawkbrothers and their bondbirds (including Kuari, the owl that gives the trilogy its informal name), and gradually grows from a frightened, guilt-ridden boy into a capable scout and mediator between Valdemar, the Hawkbrothers, and the northern tribal peoples the earlier books had largely ignored.

Across Owlflight, Owlsight, and Owlknight, Lackey shifts the series' focus toward Valdemar's northern borderlands and the non-Valdemaran cultures living there, continuing the same widening of the world's political and magical geography that the Mage Winds and Mage Storms trilogies began, while telling a more intimate, single-protagonist coming-of-age story than those two.

How to read this series

Read in publication order: Owlflight (1997), Owlsight (1998), Owlknight (1999). The trilogy follows Darian continuously from adolescence into young adulthood and should be read in sequence. It's set after the events of the Mage Winds/Mage Storms trilogies and references their outcome, so readers generally tackle those two trilogies first, though Darian's Tale can also be approached as a relatively self-contained coming-of-age story for readers less interested in following every earlier Valdemar arc first.