The Aetheric Trails is a cozy fantasy series set in a world that looks a great deal like the American Frontier: open grassland, mountain passes, small towns with timber storefronts and complicated water rights, and a sky so large it takes some getting used to.

Into this world ride three Aetheric Trail Walkers — Silas Thorne, Arthur “Artie” Penhaligon, and Elara “Lark” Weaver — practitioners of a rare and useful magic, bound by tradition and genuine affection to travel the trails and lend their gifts where they’re needed. Silas is a Fortifier, capable of strengthening or weakening the physical world around him, a man of few words and excellent instincts. Artie is a Timekeeper, able to bend time itself, though the cost comes out of his own memory in ways he’s learned not to fuss about. Lark is a Lantern, whose gift is for truth — finding it, revealing it, occasionally and carefully concealing it — and whose senses pay the price each time she uses it.

Together they are what’s called a Balanced trio, which means they can share the burden of their magic among themselves. It also means they’ve been riding together long enough to finish each other’s sentences and disagree without embarrassment and know, without discussing it, who should ask the first question and who should ask the second.

Each novel finds them arriving in a new town with a problem nobody has quite solved yet. The problems are the kind that real frontier life produces: a creek running lower than it should, a dispute that’s older than anyone remembers, a decision made in good faith that’s having consequences nobody planned for. There are no villains here — only people who are wrong about something important, and a trio with the patience and the particular gifts to help them see it.

These are warm books, unhurried books, books with room in them for a good cup of coffee and a fire burning down to coals and a story that takes all night to tell — and whose teller keeps losing the ending, which is its own kind of charm.