Binder

The rain country keeps its secrets. Lellander intends to stay one of them.

Twelve hundred years old, presumed dead, and entirely comfortable with both, he is the last Binder of a school the world has forgotten, living out eternity doing quiet maintenance on things that must never open. He has outlasted gods, dragons, and the end of the world as everyone knew it. He did it alone. He prefers it that way.

Then a half-elf orphan picks the wrong pocket in the wrong town, and the most dangerous thing in her path turns out to be the one thing she cannot leave alone.

Ali is fifteen, loud, unfiled, and gifted with a talent that is the exact opposite of his: where he seals, things loosen for her. Knots slip. Locks yield. So do twelve hundred years of carefully maintained solitude. She has decided the grumpy old man needs an apprentice. He has decided he needs her to be somebody else's problem. Only one of them is going to win this negotiation, and it will take three books to settle.

A story about the things we keep shut, the people who let themselves in anyway, and a man discovering, very much against his will, that some doors were never meant to hold.

Binder is a complete trilogy of novellas: Orphan, Runaway, and Apprentice. Comedy up front. Bring something for later.