Oathbound

Legendborn Cycle Series

Author: Tracy Deonn

Book 3 in the Legendborn Cycle series

Pages: 656

Published: 2025

Age: 16+

Severed from the Legendborn. Oathbound to a monster.

Bree Matthews is alone. She exiled herself from the Legendborn Order, cut her ancestral connections, and turned away from the friends who can’t understand the impossible cost of her powers. This is the only way to keep herself—and those she loves—safe.

But Bree’s decision has come with a terrible price: an unbreakable bargain with the Shadow King himself, a shapeshifter who can move between humanity, the demon underworld, and the Legendborn secret society. In exchange for training to wield her unprecedented abilities, Bree has put her future in the Shadow King’s hands—and unwittingly bound herself to do his bidding as his new protégé.

Meanwhile, the other Scions must face war with their Round Table fractured, leaderless, and missing its Kingsmage, as Selwyn has also disappeared. When Nick is detained by the Order’s Merlins, he invokes an ancient law that requires the High Council of Regents to convene at the Northern Keep and grant him an audience. No one knows what he will demand of them…or what secrets he has kept hidden from the Table.

As a string of mysterious kidnappings escalates and Merlins are found dead, it becomes clear that no matter how hard Bree runs from who she is, the past will always find her.

About the Legendborn Cycle Series

Books in series order

  1. 1.Legendborn(2020)
  2. 2.Bloodmarked(2022)
  3. 3.Oathbound(2025)

Reading age: 16+ years

This series should be read in order.

Filled with mystery and an intriguingly rich magic system, Tracy Deonn’s YA contemporary fantasy Legendborn offers the dark allure of City of Bones with a modern-day twist on a classic legend and a lot of Southern Black Girl Magic.

After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus.

A flying demon feeding on human energies.
A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down.
And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw.

The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.