Five blue goats. One broken-down ranch. And a man who thought fences would be simpler than people.
After fifteen years as a contract soldier, Dagen Vell buys a remote ranch the way you take a wound: quickly, and without looking too closely. The previous owner's paperwork somehow neglected to mention the five slate-blue goats already living there, or their unsettling gift: they always know when something in the world has gone wrong.
Not the future. Not disasters. Just the uneasy truth that something is broken—a cracked hillside, a lie nobody wants to admit, a village that's forgotten how to trust. The goats notice. Unfortunately for Dagen, they also expect him to do something about it.
As the seasons turn, the former mercenary finds himself mending fences, earning the wary respect of suspicious neighbors, matching wits with an unusually reasonable trading company that wants his herd, and surviving a flood that doesn't care how good his training was. Somewhere along the way, he discovers that belonging to a place can be far more dangerous than surviving a battlefield—and considerably harder to walk away from.
Warm, dryly funny, and full of unforgettable animals, The Rancher's Blue Goats is a standalone cozy fantasy perfect for readers who loved Legends & Lattes, Beware of Chicken, and The Spellshop—but wanted livestock instead of coffee, and a narrator who still thinks in military logic when the gossip starts.
Leaving would be easy. He's done it before. Staying is the part nobody trained him for.
