The Immortals (Tamora Pierce) Books in Order

The Immortals quartet moves Tortall from courtly training grounds into full scale magical crisis. Its heroine, Veralidaine Sarrasri, known as Daine, is an orphan from neighboring Galla with a strange gift for understanding animals. When she takes a job helping drive ponies for the Queen's Riders, it quickly becomes clear that her talent is more than a knack, it is wild magic.

Daine's power lets her speak with animals, heal them, and even slip into their minds or bodies. Under the guidance of the mage Numair Salmalin she begins to understand both the reach and the danger of that magic. At the same time, the world is changing around her. Immortals, powerful nonhuman creatures that were once locked in the Divine Realms, have broken free and now stalk Tortall's borders and coasts.

These books are full of griffins, stormwings, spidrens, dragons, basilisks, and stranger beings that do not fit neatly into good or evil. Daine's ability to hear them and sometimes befriend them gives readers a view of Tortall that sits outside human politics, even as those politics drive the plot.

Each volume pushes her further. In Wild Magic she finds a new home among the Queen's Riders while fending off attacks on Pirate's Swoop. Wolf Speaker sends her back to the valley near her old home, where a wolf pack begs her to stop nobles from destroying their land. Emperor Mage drags her into the glittering, rotten court of Carthak on a delicate peace mission, asking her to heal the emperor's beloved birds while she quietly uncovers treachery.

The final book, The Realms of the Gods, literally pulls Daine and Numair out of the mortal world and into the Divine Realms during a brutal war. There she learns the truth about her parentage and must find a way back to Tortall before the people she loves are destroyed by old enemies and newer horrors.

The Immortals books balance creature centered wonder with war, politics, and questions about what it means to wield power that brushes up against the work of gods. They sit between Song of the Lioness and Protector of the Small in the Tortall timeline and are a natural next step if you want more magic, more nonhuman characters, and a heroine whose greatest strength is her bond with the living world.