The healer's daughter is sent to beg, because the village has worked out that her life is the cheapest thing it currently owns. Orlaith MacBride scrapes the last of the feverfew into her apron pocket and steps out of her father's cottage into a grey-purple dusk smelling of woodsmoke and somebody's recent bloodletting. The thorn border at the edge of Thornhaven hums like a harp string left too long to vibrate. She has spent her entire life learning not to touch it. Tonight they send her through it. Her father has been dying for eight hundred and ninety-seven days. She has counted every one. Every soul in Thornhaven knew it was not inevitable. Every soul except her. Tadhg Byrne has not needed anything from a mortal in a very long time. He is owed a debt by every living thing inside that border and he collects in the only currency that has ever held here: bargains, struck in blood, honoured precisely to the letter and never one syllable beyond it. He expects a frightened girl. He gets a healer who reads the terms before she signs them. What follows is a bargain neither can break. A bloodstorm that traps them in the same cave. A herb exchange conducted like a negotiation between hostile states. An apology delivered in the rain by somebody who has never previously needed to make one. A test at the Thorn Fortress, a kiss in the dust, and an oath sworn at the exact midpoint of everything, when it is much too late to pretend either of them is still merely transacting. Then the blight mark begins to answer the ground, and Orlaith understands what she has actually agreed to. *Tadhg lied to me. He hurt me. He let me believe my father's death was inevitable when-* She does not finish the sentence, because the messenger arrives first, voice ragged: *The Summer Court has broken the agreement. The human's father was taken from the cottage five minutes ago.* There is a spy in the fortress and a poisoned cup already poured. Thornhaven will want to know what she gave away. It will not want to know what he did. And a fae king's word, honoured exactly, has never once meant mercy.

Rosalind Harlow presses a folded cloth against an Ash prisoner's side and counts to ten, willing her left hand to hold still. The tremor starts in her wrist, travels through her fingers, and ends in the cloth's edge fluttering like a moth wing. She is an Ivy Court healer. He is the enemy. That is how this is supposed to work. Then she sees the mark on his wrist. Rosalind's brother Brannon has been turning to stone since the morning his hand stopped halfway to the butter dish and his fingers went grey. She has spent the three months since tearing through the Ivy Court's archives, bribing clerks, stealing into locked rooms, hunting a Vance forge-seal her own court confiscated after a border skirmish five years ago. *"The cure Brannon needed. Right here, on the wrist of a man who would rather die than help her."* Sebastian Vance was twelve when Ivy raiders burned his family's forge. He hid in the catacombs and listened. He has no reason on this island to hand an Ivy healer anything at all. So they do the only thing that will hold. *"The Rite of Cantle is the only way two fae from opposite courts can work together without one of us eventually betraying the other."* Blood mixing. Ash leaves and ivy roots. A mark on the palm that neither of them can take off, and that neither of them can explain to their own people. It hands Lady Winifred Vale exactly what she needs. Rosalind has been trying to earn that woman's approval for seven years, and Winifred has been waiting just as long for something she can say out loud in front of the Curative Circle. And none of it touches the older bargain. Before any of this, a dying elder pressed a single pressed ash leaf into a boy's bloody palm in a forge that had been cold for three days, and told him what the fire would charge him. The prophecy does not name a man. It names a bloodline. And every time that blood truly loves somebody, the fire comes for the person they love most. An enemies-to-lovers fae romantasy of two warring courts, a petrifying curse, a rite that cannot be undone, and two people who each have a very good reason to betray the other. The romance is closed-door.

*You moved it.* Corinna Vane keeps her voice flat, the way you speak to a cat you know will scratch. A treatise has migrated out of the Sepulchral alcove and into cartography, two floors and a stairwell's worth of wrong, and Roderic Hale will not look up from the ledger he is pretending to study. This is the Archives of the Sun Court: the eastern wing of the Sunstone Palace, a cathedral of marble and brass where the gaslights hiss day and night. Corinna has been at her desk three hours and catalogued exactly nothing. She fills the acquisitions page with titles she invents on the spot, one of them *A Comprehensive History of Sun-Lighting in the Lower Boroughs*, because what she actually has to do today is get a note out of the building. *The old bell foundry, midnight. Tell me you're safe or I'll burn the city down to find you.* Signed with one letter. C. It is meant for Mira Stroud, a healer in the Shadow Quarter, and it has to go down the brass grille into the courier's chute before six. Roderic is sitting where he can see the grille. He has already reported Corinna once, to the High Luminary, and nothing came of it. So this time he brings his information to a Warden. The Warden is Dorian Locke. Dark blue, brass buttons, a sunburst pinned to his collar, a scar above one eyebrow that the gaslight makes look like a crack in stone. He is the Sun Court's most famous Warden, the one who led the raid on the Shadow Court's hideout in the Warrens, and he arrives at the Archives asking for someone who knows the building. He is not there at random. He is hunting. What neither of them says aloud: Corinna is Violet Vane's daughter, a shadow-weaver who has spent eight years hiding among books about the sun. And Dorian spent those same eight years locking collars onto people like her and calling it justice, until he understood what had been done to his sister Elara. What sits under both of them is the thing High Luminary Elowen Ashford has actually been building. Not a market in shadow-weavers. An army, assembled out of children taken from the Quarter, a collar she designed herself, and a relic called the Heart of Ash. A romantasy about an archivist who has forged her entire life, a Warden unpicking his, and a chase that ends at a broken bridge with a coward, a vial and a river; closed-door.

The bandage comes away with blood and something worse - a black thread of rot that clings to the fabric like a live thing. Elowen folds it before her sister can see it. Rosamund watches anyway. *"You're out of foxglove. I can smell the empty jar from here."* Three weeks ago it was a thin cut on Rosamund's forearm, the kind that should have healed in a day. Instead it festered black, and the veins have been creeping toward her shoulder ever since like roots under the skin. Every herbalist in Hearthwood has looked at it and had nothing. Elowen has spent her mother's silver, traded her father's hunting knife, and promised favours she cannot yet name. Then Margot comes up the stairs, hitting the loose third step the way she always does, and drops a folded paper on the bed. A relic. A cup, one of the old Ash King's treasures, said to heal anything. The location of the last known owner. *"You want to save her. I want to watch you try."* The address is a crossroads outside town. The name is Corin Blackwood, Ash Lord - the one who killed the old Ash King in a duel five years ago, took the throne, and then vanished behind walls of obsidian and ash trees while the Winter Court circled his territory. Elowen crosses the border uninvited. Lucian Vane is waiting in the throne room to call her a spy in front of the whole court. What Corin puts on the table instead is a trade. The cup was shaped from the first ash tree; it can heal any wound and break any curse. Help him retrieve it, and he will use it on Rosamund before the next new moon. Three days, then, of trusting a man with silver blood and ash-grey eyes and a duelling scar across his collarbone. There is a cellar with a skeleton in it. There is a forged message designed to separate them. There is a birthmark on Elowen's wrist whose runes match a key that should not exist. And there is the thing Corin knows and does not say: what a shadow of his was doing near a barn in her village on the day Rosamund was cut. When she finally hits him for it, the sound echoes. This is a fae court romantasy about a bargain struck over a dying sister, a lord who has spent years pretending he is not a king, and a human woman who turns out to be the most dangerous thing in the room. The romance is closed-door.

Rosalind Ashford counts the last of her coins for the third time, the copper edges biting into her palm, while her brother Leo works through the family sword forms on the pier behind her. Thirty-seven. Not enough. Not nearly enough. She takes the purse to the harbormaster anyway. *Leo's conscription papers. I need them to disappear.* Garrick Vane hefts it once and laughs at her. The order is already signed and sealed with the Queen's stag, antlers crowned with stars. Leo Ashford, Fourth Scout Company, report by the new moon. Ten days. Vane does offer her one substitution. The Heart of Solstice: the ancient artifact locked in the Starvault on Ember Island, a relic that can recharge any mage's gem regardless of their bond. Nobody has breached the Starvault in fifty years. The Queen has wanted it for years. And the man already hunting it sails into Port Tiderun that same night, under a black hull and a flag bearing a crescent moon pierced by a single star. Caspian Nightfall. Grey eyes, a silver-white scar across his throat, and the face her family blames for the fire. The man who walked out of the Ashford manor while her father's body was still cooling on the floor. *I'm a failed fire mage with thirty-seven coppers to my name. I can barely keep my own brother fed.* He offers a truce anyway, freely and without condition: she helps him reach the Heart, he gets her brother out. Neither of them plans on the shard of star-metal that ends up lodged in both their chests, a silver thread that pulls taut when one walks too far from the other and will not let go until the moon completes her cycle. Maren Sullivane, who once wrote to Rosalind offering to buy the Ashford debts if she would spy on her own household, is circling the Queen, whispering, trying to earn her place as the favourite. And in a captain's desk there is a cracked leather logbook with a child's handwriting in it, and an order for accelerant, paid in full, no questions asked. Rosalind was nine. She has spent sixteen years letting everyone believe somebody else burned the Ashford estate to the ground. *We're both guilty. That's why we fit.* A romantasy of harbours, gem-bound mages and warring houses, with a conscription notice, a vault nobody has cracked in fifty years, a forced magical tether, a Queen who wanted a family's land, and a truth the heroine has been outrunning since she was a child. The heat is closed-door.

The hall itself is the danger. Ashfall drifting through torchlight like black snow, bonfires crackling, boots scraping wet across ash-slicked stone, and every exit already accounted for by the one person in the room who came here to leave. Lira presses her spine against a soot-stained pillar and counts. Three doors to the courtyard. Two servant passages behind the dais. One window high on the eastern wall, too narrow for anything but a child or a starving cat. She mapped them all before the first dance began. The masquerade swirls in front of her, one court in crimson masks and the other in grey silk, bodies pressed together in the false intimacy of the thing. A string quartet plays something mournful from the gallery. One hour. One hour, then the queen retires, and she can slip back to the archives. Her fingers find the pouch at her belt. The emberstone inside pulses warm against her thigh, a heartbeat that has no business existing. Three layers of cloth and she still feels it, that low hungry thrum like a second pulse under her skin. *Still hiding, Thornwood?* Silver mask over the upper half of his face, only the mouth showing, eyes the colour of cooling ash. Riven Cinderfall, the Emberlord prince, who she knows from formal portraits in the archives where he is stern and distant and untouchable, and who is none of those things at two paces. What follows: a hostage prince, a scribe's choice, an ashrunner's embrace, the weight of a locket, the truth found in ashes, a stronghold everyone believed lost, and an heir nobody has counted on. *Your claim to both thrones for your spy's freedom?* *She's not a spy.* *She's a traitor.* Lira has to decide whether a man who has spent his life being the instrument of one court is worth surrendering the only thing that has ever kept her alive, which is the ability to leave any room in under four seconds.

A house that has been sealed room by room since an execution is not a home. It is a waiting room, and tonight somebody has come to collect. *They're here.* Rosalind Blackwood presses her back against the cold plaster of the hallway wall with a candle trembling in her hand. Below, the front door groans open, too heavy for a servant's knock, and a man's voice sharp as broken glass carries up the stairs. *By order of Lady Morningside. The Blackwood girl is to attend the Veil Festival immediately.* Her aunt's answering murmur is silk over gravel, placating and useless. Those guards have never waited for pleasantries. They will be up the stairs in thirty seconds. She blows out the candle. The corridor goes black and she moves by memory: past the grandfather clock stopped at her brother's hour of death, past the portrait of her mother whose eyes follow even in pitch dark. Her fingers find the door to Julian's old room before her eyes adjust. Dust and dried lavender. The room was ordered sealed after the execution. Rosalind picked the lock two years ago and knows which floorboard creaks, which window sash sticks, and exactly where the thing she is going back for is hidden. What follows: a debt she never asked for, a carriage ride she did not agree to, a name she cannot escape, a promise made to the dead, blood she never asked to carry, a drink she should not have accepted, and a laugh that costs her everything. *Yes, you ridiculous man. Yes.* The court exploded. Aldric did not hear any of it. Nobody knows what they are walking into. Nobody knows whether the locket will open, or whether the woman holding the other half of the bargain will keep it, and Rosalind has to decide whether an alliance with the family that ruined hers is worth the one thing she swore over her brother's body she would never trade.

Deveral Cade is a dealmaker, a man who has never given anything away in his life, and the last person on the continent a woman with nothing left to trade should be meeting at midnight. Morrow Zander presses her palm flat against her brother's forehead and counts the seconds until the heat tells her something she does not want to know. Rigel's skin burns through her glove. His breath comes in shallow rasps, each one a small battle lost. The wasting curse has painted his cheeks a bruised purple and the yellow in his eyes has deepened since morning, more yolk than white now. She has watched that colour shift across six months, tracking it the way sailors track a tide that only goes out. *You're not supposed to touch me. You'll catch it.* *I can't catch a curse, idiot. I'm your sister.* *Same blood.* *Same stubborn blood.* The room smells of camphor and something sour, the particular stink of a body eating itself from the inside. She has got used to it, which is the worst part. Then the letter arrives in handwriting that is elegant and precise and nothing like her father's frantic scrawl. *I understand your brother is ill. I have something that might help. Meet me at the Hall of Oaths at midnight. Come alone.* She reads it twice. Hope first, sharp and dangerous as a blade against the ribs. Then the dread, because that man does not give gifts. He makes deals, and she has nothing left. What follows: the price of a feather, smoke and honey on the tongue, a game of prick and hide, a burn he keeps covered, the shape of a truce, and a nightmare that will not open its hand. *Promise me you won't leave me alone.* *I promise.* *This oath binds you to a woman who will spend the rest of her life waiting for you to betray her.* *Yes.* She thinks about him at the bedside, in the hall, in the four seconds before every door she opens. She is not going to stop. Not when the oath is discharged, not when the crown changes hands, not ever.

Cordelia Vane presses her palm flat against the grave earth and whispers the bone-chant twice before the ground answers. She picked this plot because nobody comes here. The old section, ivy over the headstones, the iron fence rusted through, the gravekeeper's shed empty three rows back. Since the Emberfall Accord, raising the dead is a capital offence. The man who comes up out of the ground was a second cousin of hers. Gareth. He smiled too much, mended his own coat, and died young in the border woods, gutted by something nobody will name aloud. She has been grinding his bone powder in secret for a week. She raised him wrong. The jaw hangs unhinged, the spirit never anchored, and instead of a voice she gets symbols burning in the air between them. A hand with six fingers crushing a femur to powder. A tower with a flame at its peak. Cordelia did not do this out of grief. She did it because if the border patrol can lose a man like Gareth, it can lose her brother Leo, who coughs into his hand and carries a medical book everywhere and would not last a season on that border. Then a firebolt takes Gareth apart, and Julian Ashford steps out from behind a mausoleum with embers still in his hand and the brass flame of the Emberfall Guard on his collar. He says someone reported a necromantic disturbance and he drew the patrol. Then he tells her the truth. A note arrived at his quarters an hour before, unsigned, naming the place and the hour and exactly what she would be doing. *"Someone wanted you caught, Cordelia. Someone wanted me to catch you."* Cordelia's cousin Morwen wears a necklace of finger bones taken from executed criminals and has wanted her removed from the succession since they were children. Morwen has an offer, and leverage to go with it: Leo's conscription, moved up to five days. What Gareth's broken message points at is older and worse than either house, and it is already looking for a body to live in. A fantasy romance of necromancers and fire mages, house politics and a treaty nobody intends to honour, about a woman who breaks the law for her brother and the guard who is supposed to arrest her for it. The romance is closed-door.

Rosa finds her brother's pulse before the infirmary door has finished swinging shut. Forty beats in thirty seconds. Eighty per minute. Below ninety means the soul-fire is guttering. The spark crystal hanging over Leo's cot has dimmed to the colour of weak tea. She replaced it yesterday. It should have lasted a week. Dr Penhallow calls it soul-fire atrophy. No known cause. No known cure. The crystal lanterns buy time and nothing else, and the wasting is accelerating. So Rosa needs a Grade Seven crystal out of the vault, the kind reserved for the Forge's main crucible, the kind you need the Master's seal to draw. Constance Hargrave holds the seal, and Constance has the dawn shift. Rosa learned the ducts behind every room in the Spark Forge when she was fourteen, after the older journeymen locked her in the scullery for a prank she had not committed. She gets the crystal. What she has not planned for is the man leaning in the vault doorway with his hands in his coat pockets, watching her take it. Julian Crow has a proposition. Out in the Ruin Marches there is a void mage holding the only complete formula for the thing that is killing Leo, and he will trade it for exactly one thing: safe passage across the border, with a guide who knows the smuggler routes and the Forge patrol schedules. *"Because you're desperate enough to say yes."* Rosa sets a single condition. If this is a trap, if he is working for whoever framed him, *"I'll kill you before you can blink."* *"Midnight. Bring supplies for a week. Don't tell anyone."* What Julian does not say on that road is that he is carrying a folded note written in a hand he recognises, and that the woman who wrote it does not want Leo cured. She wants his root, the thing that burns in a mage's chest and feeds the spark. If she gets it, Leo will not simply die. There will be nothing left to bury. A court romantasy of fire magic and void magic: a bargain struck over a stolen crystal, a border crossing dressed up as an extradition, and a new moon counting down. The romance is closed-door.

Sabina has seen men burn before. She presses her back against a blackwood trunk still warm from the last border skirmish and tries not to think about how she knows that particular smell. The woodland between Ash and Flame was oaks and ironwood once. Now it is toothpicks and cinders and old smoke. For three weeks the reports have said the same thing: villages along the border stripped of their young, the trail running into Flame territory. Her mother's council has called for war twice. Sabina held them off and demanded proof. Her scout Kael, nineteen years old with fresh ash-scale spreading across his jaw, comes back with it. A patrol camped in the old quarry under the Burnell standard, and prisoners bound at the wrists and ankles. Doran Flint has invited himself along on this mission. He wants Sabina's post as Warden of Secrets, keeper of the Ash Court's intelligence, and he has been arranging her small failures for a while now. A late report. A missing manifest. Nothing she can prove. She steps into the open and tells the Flame patrol to release the prisoners and stand down. Then the tent opens and a man comes out with no armor at all: black hair cropped short, amber eyes, a red cloak pinned with a silver flame in a ring of iron, and knuckles ruined into scar tissue from practising fire magic without gloves. Alaric Burnell, Flame Prince. What Sabina finds at that quarry is not what either court has been told. There is a symbol on a piece of charred cloth, three interlocking circles, slightly off-centre. She has seen it in her mother's grimoire, locked in an iron chest she was forbidden to open. Her brother Jasper is in the east tower where the morning sun can reach him, because the healers say it slows the blight. Their father died of the ash blight. Their grandmother. Their great-uncle. Jasper is next, and he has started hearing something call to him at night. And in the Ash Court, Doran has a collar with old wardings etched into it and two words to go with it. *"Marry me."* A fae court fantasy romance about a spymaster, a fire mage and an inherited sickness neither court will name honestly. The romance is closed-door.

The executioner's axe hits the ice and sticks. Katya Volkova is fourteen, standing in the front row of witnesses on the Frost Palace steps, and the sound is wrong: a clean, cold thunk that means her father's neck is still attached to his shoulders. General Irina Morozova holds up her left hand, where two fingers end in smooth scar tissue with a thin thread of charcoal running beneath the healed skin. *Your father gave me these.* She says it to Katya, not to the crowd. Her brother Pyotr is twelve, gripping her hand, still expecting their father to talk his way free. *The Heartstone is the oldest magic*, her father told her once, when she was small and he was teaching her the names of the stars. *It can heal anything. Even the ash curse.* She did not understand then. She understands in the processing hall, where a clerk opens her forearm for a blood test, writes negative in his ledger, and stamps both children into twelve-hour shifts in the textile mills until they turn eighteen, while the grey patch at Pyotr's temple spreads to his cheek overnight. By the time she is grown, Katya sits with her back to the door in a tavern called the Silver Coin, across from a man in a wolf-fur coat with a gold tooth who has a map of the Frost Court treasury and will not lay it on the table. Half now, half when she has the stone. The palace guards rotate on a schedule that changes twice a day. The wards are worse than the guards. Then Prince Darian Mordvin, pale blue eyes the colour of winter sky at dawn, hires her as a guide to show him the outer wards. Three days inside the palace. Three days closer to the Heartstone than she has ever been. He knew her name before she ever set foot in his throne room. General Morozova takes one look at her hands and the way she stands and tells the prince she is not a guide, she is a criminal, and then says something else quietly enough that he might not have heard it at all. A closed-door court romantasy of ash magic, frost runes and a relic that has to be stolen, for anyone who likes a thief with one thing left to lose.

A board groans overhead and Lenora stops breathing. The inn has been abandoned for three seasons, long enough for the roof to sag and the floorboards to warp, but the basement smells of lamp oil and sweat and something metallic she cannot name. Against the far wall stand twenty-three tearstone crates, stacked chest-high, each marked with the Sorrow Court's broken circle wrapped in thorns. She counts them twice. That is enough to arm every exile in Thornwood. Her mother wants specifics. Grade, quantity, destination. Queen Vashti does not send her only daughter into enemy territory for guesses. Lenora picks the lock on the nearest crate, three clicks, and finds black crystals the size of her thumb nested in grey wool, pulsing with a faint inner light. Then a silver wire snaps against her ankle and somewhere in the dark a bell starts ringing. She takes a tearstone anyway. She burns a wall of fire between herself and the doorway, smashes the boards off a high window with a broken table leg, and drops into the mud of the alley below. She does not get away clean. Behind her in the mist, a calm voice used to being obeyed says: *"Find her. I want to know why Vashti's daughter is spying on me."* Rourke Ashford. The exiled prince, born with a touch that drains magic out of another person, carrying a tearstone in his breast pocket that pulses like it is alive. He is holding her dropped glove, the one with the Flame Court phoenix embroidered on it and her mother's initials stitched into the cuff. Then a sealed letter reaches her, red wax still warm. Corbin's trial has been moved forward. He will face the pyre at sunrise. Corbin is her little brother. The one who wanted to be a scholar instead of a soldier, ink-stained fingers, a missing front tooth. He is in Vashti's dungeons, and that is the whole shape of the arrangement between mother and daughter: find the cache, deliver the coordinates, free Corbin. Which leaves Lenora with a stolen stone, a court that will call her a traitor, a brother on a countdown, and the one person who offers her help without asking her to swear anything for it. A fae court romantasy of two hostile courts, a spy who is also a hostage, and a fire that turns out not to be the one she inherited. The romance is closed-door.