Nobody expects anything from Shep.
He is the mage’s errand boy — the orphan who sweeps floors and collects herbs while the baron’s son learns to throw fire. Three tests have confirmed what everyone already believed: no magic, no talent, no future worth mentioning.
Then, goblins overrun the dungeon outside Wrenfall, and Shep falls into the dark.
Nine days underground with an army preparing for war. No food, no light, no way out. Nothing but the strange luck that keeps the goblins from quite seeing him, a juvenile goblin he can’t bring himself to kill, and an elven delegation the goblins have taken prisoner — including a princess he has no business noticing.
He doesn’t save the world. He saves five people from a dungeon and finds his way home.
But when the elven royal mage holds out a stone and asks him to hold it, everything everyone believed about Shep turns out to have been wrong.
Beneath Notice is the first book in the Unmarked Mage series — a classic quest fantasy for readers who grew up on Prydain and never found quite what they were looking for in the books that came after.
