Rain Wild Chronicles Books in Order

The Rain Wild Chronicles pick up the thread of dragons and the toxic Rain Wild River after the end of the Liveship Traders and Tawny Man trilogies. Set mostly among the treetop towns of the Rain Wilds, the quartet follows a group of malformed young dragons and equally marked human outcasts sent upriver on a journey that few expect them to survive.

The Rain Wilds themselves are hostile, swampy and acid scarred, a place where the river’s caustic waters force cities into the high branches and slowly reshape the people who live there. Many Rain Wild children are born with scales, claws or other dragonlike traits and shortened life spans. In Dragon Keeper, local traders decide to solve two problems at once by recruiting these unwanted youngsters as “keepers” to escort the stunted dragons away from town in search of the legendary Elderling city of Kelsingra.

Among the keepers is Thymara, a girl whose claws and scales mark her as too changed to marry, and Tats, a former slave trying to build a future in a society that barely acknowledges him. They travel aboard the liveship barge Tarman with Captain Leftrin and Alise, a Bingtown scholar who has escaped a loveless marriage in order to study dragons first hand. Together they push a ragged caravan of hungry, half flightless dragons upriver into uncharted country.

Dragon Haven and City of Dragons continue that trek as environment, predators and human treachery take their toll. The dragons, driven by ancestral memories of Kelsingra, grow more demanding as they change, and the keepers confront their own transformations into early stage Elderlings. Relationships splinter and reform, from uneasy romances to new chosen families, while external threats from Chalcedean hunters and Bingtown interests remind everyone that dragon parts are worth a fortune.

By Blood of Dragons the company has reached Kelsingra, a city of black stone and silver inlay where Elderling memories echo through statues and streets. The dragons must relearn how to fly and find the silver wells that sustain them, while their human partners risk addiction by “memory walking” through the city’s past. Far away, Tintaglia fights for her life against humans who would strip her for parts, and the decisions made in Kelsingra ripple back to Bingtown, the Rain Wilds and beyond.

Rain Wild has a slightly different feel from the Fitz books, with more point of view characters and a stronger focus on ecological questions, bodily change and chosen identity. It also deepens the series’ ongoing interest in how humans and dragons reshape one another over time. For best effect, read it after Liveship Traders and Tawny Man, when references to earlier events and returning faces will carry the most weight.