Seventeen pence sit in a stack on the nightstand. Enough for stale bread and weak tea at the stall on Crispin Street, not enough for Dr. Marsh's bitterwort syrup. In the next room Catherine's sister Eloise is coughing the wet, tearing cough their mother made three winters ago, in the bed Eloise sleeps in now. Catherine pulls on her shawl to go beg the doctor for credit at first light, and stops. A black vine has grown across the inside of the front door overnight. The thorns are the colour of dried blood, and a scrap of parchment has been impaled on one of them. *To the Heir of Rosalind Lowell: The Ash Court calls its due.* The man waiting in the grey London dawn wears green velvet with a silver thorn pinned at his collar, and he already knows exactly what is wrong with her sister. *You can either honor it, or watch your sister die.* He is Edmund Wincroft, half-fae prince of a court where the king is dying, the seasons are turning wrong and the gates are collapsing. Catherine's mother was a Winter Court spy who defected, fell in love with the king of the Ash Court, and swore a blood oath binding her firstborn. Catherine is that oath. *The debt doesn't die, Catherine. It just waits.* She is given fifteen minutes to say goodbye to Eloise. What she carries into a court of immortals is the one skill she has. *I'm a seamstress,* she tells Edmund. *You learn to read people when you're fitting them for dresses.* By her first masque she has read Lady Margaret Vane, who intends to marry him, and the bruise under the powder on Margaret's cheek that says Margaret has been meeting somebody in secret. She has read Julian Ashford too, the scarred courtier who calls himself the king's shadow and his memory, and who says he has been studying this curse for three hundred years. Julian is the one who names the price out loud, because Edmund will not. The curse breaks only if Catherine stops being human, freely and by her own choice, while her sister goes on dying in a London tenement. *I vow to stand beside Edmund Wincroft, Ash Court prince, and break this curse, on my blood and my honor.* A fae-court romantasy that runs from a Crispin Street tenement to the Door of Thorns, with a dying king's bargain, a traitor working inside the walls, and a seamstress who finishes the book wearing a crown. Closed-door.

Fourteen instruments, each sterilized twice, arranged by size. Cressida Thornwood reaches for the fifteenth and cannot make her hand stop shaking. Below her window, half the Silver Court is drinking its way through the Festival of Cinders. On the table in front of her, Lord Veran Brynmor is dying of ash corruption that has already reached his lung. The approved Silver Court protocol takes six days. He does not have six days. *Use silver, he dies. Use ash, I die.* So she does the forbidden thing she has been hiding since she was a child: she calls up the ash magic that lives in her bones like a splinter, weaves it through her silver, and pushes both into the wound. Brynmor sits up. The bark starts creeping along her knuckles. An hour later there is a dead king, twelve spears, and Darian Blackwater of the Ash Court standing in her healing tower with an iron torque burned into his throat, arresting the healer who was on duty. In a cell lined with wards built to smother silver, Cressida melts the bars instead. He opens the door while her hand is still glowing. *You're Ash Court.* He is also coughing silver threads into his palm. Silver corruption, the same thing that grew in his mother's lungs until she drowned on shards of it, and no Ash healer can touch it. What he offers is not mercy. It is a contract, spoken out loud and sworn in blood and fire: *A life-debt. You save my life, I owe you one year of service. Refuse, and the curse drains my magic.* Her terms are her brother. Orin walks free, escorted to the border, out of reach of the woman who taught them both to be afraid. Because the person Cressida is really running from is Mira Thornwood, Silver Court Healer-in-Chief, her own mother, who locked her in a cellar at nine for saving a sparrow and has been feeding her a silver-root tincture for nineteen years. And Prince Aldric Silvermoor has a list of names in his possession with lines already drawn through some of them, including Darian's. What follows is a year of service that neither of them can survive alone: a ride through the ash, a marriage contract designed to swallow two courts, a confession traded for safe passage, and a mother who turns out to have one last thing she can do right. Court-intrigue fantasy romance with two hidden magics, a life-debt sworn in blood, and an enemies-to-lovers arc that ends at an altar and then at a horizon; the love scenes are closed-door.

Ossoria is a city made of the dead. The arches of its cathedral are woven from the femurs of ancestors; its pillars are stacked vertebrae; the throne itself is bone. Rosalind Blackwood is the heir to it, and at midnight she is sitting at her brother's bedside counting a pulse that keeps getting slower. Edmund is seventeen. He has none of the necromancy that runs in their blood and never wanted any. He wanted to be a scholar and go south to the libraries. Instead there is a curse settling into his marrow, and Queen Mother Alda gives him another week, perhaps two. There is a cure. One drop of flame-mage blood, heated with ash-root, fed to him at the waning moon. The flame court will hand it over the day Rosalind marries into it. Then Rosalind does the arithmetic out loud. Alda says she has searched four years for a cure. Edmund only fell ill three months ago. Her grandmother does not flinch so much as settle, and admits it: she wove the curse herself, four years ago, to force the alliance. Six days. That is what Rosalind has, and the flame court's envoy is already at the gates. He is not an envoy. Darian Ashworth has come himself, copper-haired and unhurried, and he does not enter a hall like a man who has come to negotiate. What he offers is not marriage. A bone crown was stolen from the vault at Pyrrha and is sitting somewhere near the border crossing at Thornfall, and it amplifies curses. Three days in the Neutral Lands. She reads the traps her own people leave behind, he handles what fights back. On the fourth day he opens a vein for her brother and they never see each other again. She takes his hand on it in front of the whole court, and Lady Melisande Cruik smiles the way a person smiles at a mistake. What comes back over the border is not what set out. A bargain becomes a binding; a binding leaves flame magic burning under a necromancer's skin and a brand on her palm she cannot explain; and the crown is gone before they reach it, already sold to a merchant caravan. There is a girl at Thornfall with hair split white and red down the middle and eyes that do not match, and she matters more than the relic. A year later there is a cottage, a garden, mint tea, a brother who has learned how to laugh again, and a letter from a sorcerer that Rosalind has left folded under a pile of linens she never uses. A romantasy of court bargains, blood magic and two hostile bloodlines, ending in a life neither lead thought they were allowed. Closed-door romance.

The outer gate of Stormhaven is black iron and pale stone, the gate itself a lattice of spikes, and the line of carriages stretches thirty deep in the rain. Beatrice Hardwick sits inside one of them with her father's signet ring hidden beneath her glove and a folder of forged documents on her lap. Tonight she is Miss Elinor Graves, scholar of history, northern vowels practised in front of a cracked mirror for weeks. She hands the papers through the window with a steady hand. The guard doesn't look at them. *"Step out. Commander wants a look at everyone tonight."* Her father died on a platform in this city, convicted of Ash-wielding and treason against the Storm-King. She stood in the front row and watched, and the thing she had buried since childhood woke in her chest and set his body burning with a grey-white fire that ate through water and sand alike. Since then: false names, dyed hair, northern villages, moving every few months, dragging her younger brother Thomas with her. She has come back for the royal archives and for whatever is written there about Edmund Hardwick. Commander Rowan Ashford reads her papers the way a man reads a contract before he signs it. He is Storm-blooded, the King's own officer, and when he steps close enough that she can smell the air after lightning, her Ash magic reaches toward his the way a fire reaches toward oxygen. What she cannot know at the gate is that Rowan has been investigating the executions for twelve years, since his sister Elara was killed for consorting with powers she never had. Lord Caspian Vane, the Storm-King's Inquisitor, is the man who found her father. He is still hunting, and he is patient, and when his ship the Serpent's Kiss comes into harbour, Thomas is standing on the deck with his hands bound. *"If I fail, Thomas dies. If I fail, my father's name stays cursed forever."* Her path runs through a burning library that held the records of the Great Betrayal, an ambitious Lady Eleanor Vance who wants the commander's attention, a travelling companion named Maya whose loyalty does not hold, a court that votes on truth, and a blade forged for a ritual that needs four. A romantasy of Ash and Storm set in the kingdom of Aethermere, closed-door, ending on a balcony above a harbour city where grey sparks are beginning to show in doorways and children are learning what they carry.

A brass locket sits open on Marisol Vane's dressing table, tarnished at the hinge. Inside, a lock of silver-white hair curls against a scrap of faded blue silk - Celestine's hair, from before the sickness. Marisol snaps the locket shut and presses it into her palm until the edges bite. The pain helps her think. Her sister is coughing blood again. Silver-sickness has no cure in Silvermere; the archives are empty and the shadow mages can only slow it. The one thing that might reverse it is the Heartfire, and the Heartfire sits inside Emberforge, in the keeping of House Ember, which is to say in the keeping of the family that ruined hers. *"You're asking me to walk into a slaughterhouse and hand the butcher a knife,"* says Harlan, watching her from the doorway with his pocket watch ticking against his thigh. She goes anyway. Midnight blue gown, silver constellations stitched across the bodice, House Argent colours worn into an Ember hall on purpose. Marisol was seven the last time she was in that building. She lay flat behind a velvet curtain and listened to Bramwell Caeris tell her father that the price of her sister's life was Marisol herself, pledged to marry his son. Her father refused. Then he died on the floor of the negotiating room while she held his cold hand, and her own hands began to glow, orange-red, embers banked in ash. Ember magic. The magic of the enemy house. Dante Caeris is Bramwell's heir, the boy with amber eyes who once stared at her across a banquet hall and said nothing. He is also the only person who can get her near the Heartfire, and he wants something in return. What follows is a bargain, a set of trials, a hidden third chamber Harlan found misfiled among shipping manifests in the Silvermere archives, and a lesson Dante gives her that begins with how to stop pretending. Seraphina Blackwood, crescent-moon brooch at her collar, has been working toward her own alliance with House Ember for three years and can tell at a glance that the stitching on a guild messenger's collar is wrong. Bramwell can still fill a room by entering it. And the fire, everyone warns, takes payment from someone. A romantasy of feuding houses in the Dusklands, closed-door, ending with a dying sister, a changed pair of eyes, a wedding, and a letter sealed with a wolf's head howling at a frozen moon.

*"You're asking us to send you to die."* The great hall of Skarn smells of tallow smoke and old decisions. Twenty-three faces watch Astrid Bjornsdottir from the firelight, and not one of them believes she will come back. She is asking for coin. For supplies. A horse, if the village can spare one. Her brother Erlend has six months, maybe seven, and the hedge witch in Thornwick could not stop his coughing last winter and cannot stop it now. The hedge witch wants thirty silver. Astrid has seven coppers. Erlend has twelve silver hidden under his mattress, saved since he was twelve for a horse he now knows he will never ride. The elders offer fifteen silver and advice: let him die cleanly, in his own bed, with her beside him. So Astrid takes the horse money out of her brother's mattress, leaves a note under a candle stub, and walks into the Eternal Winter to find the Ice King. The law of the Frost Court is simple. Any mortal who crosses in and sees the palace must swear the Binding Oath, and the Oath takes everything - childhood, a mother's face, the sound of your own name. Sigrid, who drags Astrid into the throne room, votes for execution instead, and wants it public. Torben has held the ice-throne for forty-seven years and does not blink. What stops him is a white streak in a village girl's hair, because his wife Ingrid had the same one, and Ingrid died when the rebellion burned his house with her inside it. What he offers is not mercy. It is a bargain. There is an ivy growing in the heart of the Ivy Court that cures any illness, mortal or immortal. Bring back a cutting, and his own healer rides for Skarn. The Ivy Court is ruled by the Summer Queen, who hates the Frost Court and hates him, and three hundred years of Sundering sit between the two. Astrid agrees, then holds a knife to the King's throat and tells him what will happen if Erlend dies while she is gone. What neither of them plans for is what Ivy magic does inside a body full of frost - or that the rebellion that killed Ingrid never ended, and that the person writing the court's next story is already inside the palace walls, carving symbols into the ice. A closed-door fae romantasy of bargains, court politics and a truce built by two people with nothing left to lose, ending in meltwater and a spring that has not come in three hundred years.

Cassandra Thornwood has read the treaty seven times since dawn, and the loophole still holds. Article 12, subsection C: *Conscription shall apply to all able-bodied citizens of the Shadow Court between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five, with exemption granted only to those bearing sole responsibility for a dependent who cannot be relocated to the war camps.* Oliver is seventeen. His cough has worsened every winter since the fever. He is the whole of what she has left, and she has been keeping him alive since the night she pressed her back against a garden wall with a swaddled newborn in her arms and watched the family manor burn. The Ember delegation arrives with a leader nobody expected. Julian Ashford, son of a man executed for treason, a burn mark tracing his jaw. Before the first session is over he has looked at the silver locket at her throat and named what is worked into it. *"The seals on your locket are designed to hide something."* He knows she is a hybrid. He tells no one. What he does instead is press a torn scrap of paper into her hand. *Meet me at midnight. The old gardener's shed behind the east wing. I know who killed your parents. It was arson, not accident. And the man who lit the fire is still alive.* The treaty on the table is an alliance between Ember and Shadow, sealed by the binding of bloodlines through marriage, the union to last no fewer than six months from signing. The man who means to collect it is Lord Percival Harker, whose voice carries the smooth confidence of someone who has never doubted his place in a room, and who holds an execution order with Oliver's name on it. So Cassandra offers Harker a transaction. He marries her, he takes the Thornwood seat on the Shadow Council by right of alliance. Her terms are three, and the first is that Julian Ashford leaves Ashwood Estate within the hour. Her brother hears all of it through the door. Behind Harker stands Lady Seraphine Thorne, who blamed Julian's father for a son lost to the war and has spent thirty years hunting vengeance, and who keeps a silent girl on a chain in a candlelit room. The girl has Cassandra's grey-green eyes and a smaller, cheaper version of Cassandra's locket. *"This is not your cousin, Cassandra. This is your half-sister."* What finally undoes the thing done to Julian is written in his father's diary, in the tight, careful hand of a man who learned to be careful: *ash from a hearth that has known grief, water from a source that has known stillness, and a witness who will not look away.* It ends with a court of survivors lighting hearth-fires instead of pyres, and a prophecy still waiting past the horizon. A closed-door court romantasy of treaties, conscription, prophecy and a bargain made to save a brother.

Fifty people pack the throne room at Cinderhold, and Vivienne Ashcroft is accusing the Gold Court of murder. Her brother Bramwick lies three floors above with black veins spread from his collarbone to his jaw. The healers call it Cinderwaste. The only cure is the Sacred Flame the Gold Court keeps in a silver box no larger than a prayer book, held by the priest standing behind Julian Croft. Julian will not hand it over. *The Sacred Flame is not a medicine to be dispensed on demand.* So Vivienne pulls the gold clip out of her hair and lets the room look at what it hides: the line the fire carved from her temple to her jaw, covered for seven years so people would look at the ornament instead of the damage. Queen Morgana Blackthorn, watching from a throne of fused black glass, proposes a fire duel. Single combat, first blood. If Vivienne wins, the Gold Court gives up a single healing. If Julian wins, the accusation is withdrawn and the Ash Court pays blood gold for the insult. Vivienne's fire is blue-white at the core and hungry at the edges. Julian's is gold and controlled, and he is not trying to beat her, only to outlast her. Then their flames meet and do not collide. They merge, climbing into a pillar of white light that reaches the vaulted ceiling, and in the heart of it Vivienne sees the thing she has spent nineteen years burying: a thread of Gold fire running through her own. When the light dies, there is a mark on her left palm and the same mark on his. A geas of fraternity. Twenty feet, no further, or the burning starts. *Undo it,* she says. *I cannot,* the queen replies. Now tied to the man she came to destroy, with her brother's veins going blacker by the day, Vivienne has to work alongside a Gold Court son whose father has been arranging a marriage for him, and alongside Elodie Vance, who wants Julian's name and his fire, and who happens to read Old Ash script better than either of them. And under the violet light in the gorge, something is waiting with a claim on the Ash Court older than the queen's. This is a court romantasy of public duels, enforced closeness and inherited lies, driven by a woman who will burn herself down before she loses a brother. The romance is closed-door.

A single candle flame bends sideways as Marianne presses her palm to the guard's chest. His name is Thorne, and she learned that from the stretcher-bearers rather than from him. He was found alone at the eastern post, standing there, not moving, until he fell over. Half-frozen. His mouth, his fingers. The fingertips are white and the nails are going blue, and it is the Season of Embers in the Dusk Court, when the air tastes of warm earth and ripe fruit. Marianne sends her shadows into the puncture below his ribs and they come back frayed. What is in that wound is cold that seeks, cold that burrows into her magic like a worm through an apple. Frost magic, in Dusk territory, where the Edict of Boundaries has held for three hundred years. And down the hall, her sister is coughing. Eliz has been coughing more than usual for three days, sleeping badly, going pale, and Marianne finds her on the floor beside the nightstand with the ribbon from her braid snapped in two. The wasting took their grandmother. It is taking Eliz now, and nothing in any Dusk pharmacopoeia touches it. Which is how Marianne comes to open the iron-bound chest at the bottom of her wardrobe, the one with her mother's initials cut into the lid and a promise attached to it. *Burn it all. Promise me you'll never open it.* Lydia Croft was the best healer the Dusk Court had. She was also buying frost-thistle from somebody in Ashfall, the neutral pass between the courts, and there is a folded letter inside that chest in elegant handwriting that is not hers, on paper with a watermark Marianne does not recognise. The man who sells frostbloom in the Ashfall market has a cracked iris and a name. *"My name is Aldric Vance. If you want to save your sister, you'll trust me for one night."* One night on Frost soil, under Frost law, healing a scout who has been convulsing for two hours while a captain with frost in his beard calls her a liability and Aldric answers that she is his debt. What neither of them has worked out yet is why a Frost scout and a Dusk guard have the same clean puncture wound, who is putting it there, and why a man called Percival Ashford has been hunting a sick girl for months. A fae court romantasy about a healer who breaks a three-hundred-year treaty for her sister, a merchant who is not a merchant, two broken Hearts, and a war that somebody is deliberately restarting. The romance is closed-door.

A woman runs through the Thornwood with a three-day-old daughter pressed to her chest, and the fae lord who fathered the child is already standing in the clearing. He does not kill her outright. He takes the baby, sets his palm over her heart, and freezes it. *"You made a bargain," he said, "and I'm keeping it."* That is a hundred years before this story. What it leaves behind is a rule. *Don't trust the fae. Don't love them. Don't give them anything they can take.* Morwenna Greymist is about to break all three. Her half-brother Finnian has three weeks, maybe fewer. He has stopped eating. His sleep is down to four hours a night. The frost has reached his elbows, he coughs ice shards into his blankets, and the hedge healer says that if it reaches his heart there is nothing to be done. Morwenna takes it to the council: twelve fae in frost-woven robes, a mother on a thornwood throne, and Lysandra at the edge of the ring with her hand on a silver thorn locket that used to belong to Morwenna's father, waiting to say *half-blood* out loud. High Lady Elowen is unmoved. *"I have been generous with my affection. But I will not bankrupt the realm for sentiment."* So Morwenna offers to go herself. The Ember Court has a healer who has broken frost-curse before, and High Lord Corvus has already named his terms: marriage to his son, a treaty, and the healer's services, in exchange for her bloodline on the throne of Thornwood. The son is Theron Wilder. Cold amber eyes, one hand missing its smallest finger, and a phoenix branded into his palm with three tears. *"I believe we have an arrangement to discuss."* He is not what the histories said. His father is considerably worse than them - a lord who has killed every relative who might one day have challenged him, leaving exactly one other heir, a girl of eight. And what is killing Finnian is not an illness. It is locked to something, and once Theron works out what, the way to unlock it comes down to a knife, a brand, a council chamber, and a decent chance of killing him. This is a fae court romantasy about a marriage negotiated over a dying boy, an heir who would rather be nobody, and the difference between a bargain and a promise. The romance is closed-door.

Six. Seven. Eight. She counts them through the gap in the basalt while the light goes out of the gorge, and the number stops mattering at about four. Ash and hot metal. That is what the air tastes like. Copper and cinders kicked up off the gorge floor, mixed with the wet-earth smell of the river below. Anya Vasiliev presses her back against the ridge and counts the raiders spilling through the gap. They move like oil on water, shadows pooling around their boots, swallowing the last of the daylight. Her hand tightens on the hilt of her flame-sword. The fire inside her chest flickers, not with fear but with the strain of holding it in. Keep it small. Keep it tight. Mikhail is forty yards behind her wrapped in a cloak that smells of horse and old wool, and if they see him, if they so much as look at him- *Anya.* His voice cracks on her name, thin as winter ice. *I can fight.* *You can stay put. That's fighting.* The lead raider stops. She is escorting her brother to a summit neither of them believes in, across a border that has been quiet for eleven months in the way a held breath is quiet, with a fire in her chest she is not permitted to use in daylight. What follows: a cinder that will not die, a shadow that will not leave, a summit that smells wrong from the first hour, a cage of echoes, a pit that steals light, a bargain struck underneath everything, a dream that burns the dreamer, and a hearthstone that has been holding something for two generations. *Ah. The traitor. I was wondering when he'd show his face.* *Not the curse, not the pain, not the way her hand had felt in his, or the way she'd kissed him in the ruins.* The summit still has to be concluded. Somebody still has to answer for the estate that burned. And nobody in either court is promising forgiveness to whichever of them signs first.

*You're wearing the wrong mask.* Brynn's fingers stop an inch from her face, the silk-and-bone mask half-raised. Benedict Vane stands two steps behind her in the alcove, mismatched eyes catching the lantern light, brass monocle gleaming, the smell of wormwood and crushed beetle shells coming off his tinctures. The mask he gave her carried a raven on a broken circle. The one in her hand shows a willow with its roots exposed. Different sigil. Different dead family. It would have set her down in front of the one woman in that hall who knows every surviving branch of every noble lineage. *I'm testing whether you pay attention. You passed. Barely.* Brynn is a spy out of the lower warrens, wearing a glamour that smooths her jaw, darkens her hair and erases the thin silver scar across her left palm. The Dusklight Fête has been running for seventy-two years, and tonight she is meant to dance on a blade without cutting her feet. The job is a listening bug, and the plan changes at the last moment. Not under the table. On the wax seal of the envoy's wine bottle, so it travels to his glass, then his lips, then his tongue, and she hears everything he says for three days. She manages it in about three seconds, by way of a spilled tray and a lapful of red wine. Then his hand closes around her wrist. Not hard. Faster than she could have dodged. *Your apology is linen-wrapped and hollow.* *Your hands are steady. Your voice is calm. But your pulse is racing, and you're looking at the wine bottle, not at me.* Theron Vale is the Frost envoy. He lets her plant it. He lets her go. He tells her they will discuss it later. What Brynn actually has at stake is her sister. Linnet coughs blood into a handkerchief, swallows medicine she says tastes like the promises Brynn made to get it, and has been writing letters to a Frost Court healer for three months. Benedict is the one who gave her the healer's name. And what Benedict eventually wants is a poisoning at a wine ceremony, traded for a sister in a room with no windows. *Tell Brynn I'm not afraid. Tell her to do what she has to do.* Brynn swaps the vial for water. After that come a cave and a fever, two people confessing the worst thing each of them ever failed to do, a cabal that has been wearing faces on both sides of a cold war, iron chains, and a throne room where a woman from the warrens says her real name aloud in front of two courts. This is a fae court romantasy of espionage and oaths: a spy who will not make the kill she is ordered to make, a king who once hid behind a column and never forgave himself for it, a sister who refuses to be a bargaining chip, and a new court founded on a law about consent. The romance is closed-door.

*Hold still. This will sting.* Lenora Ashby has run the same injector into her brother's arm nine hundred times across three failed trials. Thomas is nineteen and looks fifteen. Fourteen months of nightshade and hellebore and sun-lily petals that cost more per ounce than her rent, and he still coughs blood into a handkerchief every morning. Then the Queen summons her, and it turns out the Queen has been reading the private journal Lenora hid under a loose floorboard in Thomas's room. The offer is laid out like a prescription. Marry Garrison Wick, the Night Court's spymaster, under the Rosethorn Pact, and serve as liaison between two fractured courts. In exchange, the Sun Court gets shadow-essence, the one substance that treats the wasting blight, and Lenora gets her licence back and a brother who stays in the infirmary rather than the charity ward. The alternative is five years in the dungeons for sedition, and Thomas dying somewhere nobody treats him. The wedding is in three days. The Pact binds them for a year, and whichever party breaks it without the other's consent dies for it. His letter arrives sealed in black wax, stamped with a crescent moon. *I have no more interest in you than you in me. Let's make this bearable.* *We are both prisoners of our courts. Let us be civil prisoners.* What Lenora does not know is that Garrison is not travelling to Aveline for a treaty. Rowan, his sister and his best agent, has been inside the Sun Court for months and is now sitting in a cell under an execution order, and his own king would rather let her die than put a concession in writing. Garrison has sixteen days. He needs guard rotations, shift changes, cell locations. He needs the one person in Aveline with every reason to have written that down. And her own household is watching. Marielle came in wearing mourning grey and checking ledgers, and the Queen has personally asked her to oversee the wedding arrangements. A court romantasy told in first and third person, with an arranged marriage both parties treat as a contract, a spymaster who lies professionally, a blight with a deliberate origin, and a bargain that only holds as long as two people keep their halves of it. The romance is closed-door.

Sewer water laps at Sorcha's knees, warm and foul, thick with things she refuses to name. She presses her back against the damp stone and counts the guard patrols above. Three sets of boots crossing the grate, pause, cross again. Standard rotation. Every fifteen minutes, a one-minute gap. That gap is the whole plan. Above her is the court vault, three doors deep behind the throne room, and inside it a fire-stone key the size of her hand, roughly cut, deep orange and pulsing faintly as if it has a heartbeat. The locksmith's apprentice had been boastful about the new mechanism. Royal blood, he had said. *Burn anyone else to cinders.* Sorcha Vance is not royal blood. The court tested her for fire-magic when she was nine, pressed a branding iron into her palm, and got no spark out of her at all. She has been scraping her thumbnail across that scar ever since. She needs the stone anyway. Her brother Liam is in the dungeons because Tarquin Aldaine put him there, and a drainer in the Warrens will sell her his location for exactly one thing. Her lockpicks were filed by a man who owed Liam a life-debt. She has not seen her brother in six months. So she takes the key. Her palm blisters and blackens in seconds. Her fingers will not open. She makes a sound she has never made before. And then she is still alive, standing on a clean stone floor she should be a pile of ash on, and that is the part that changes everything. Her way out runs across the courtyard. Mira Vance is there among the silk and velvet with gems braided into her blonde hair, and their eyes meet, and Mira's mouth curves into a slow knowing thing before she leans toward the guard beside her and whispers. At the gate a man steps out of the shadows with his hand already on his sword and eyes the exact gold of the stone burning a hole in her pocket. Ronan Drakos can feel it. He says it calls to his blood. Then he says the part nobody else in that courtyard has worked out. *You should be dead.* This is a fantasy romance set in a court that decides when you are nine years old whether you are worth anything: a thief with a ruined hand and a brother in a cell, a prince wearing the same face he has worn since childhood, a rival who is far worse than an executioner, and a stone that declined to kill the one person it should have. The heat is closed door.

A strip of linen, once white and now stained yellow-brown, unspools across Lenora Voss's lap. She measures the rot's advance by how much cloth it eats. Three days ago a handspan covered her sister's forearm. Tonight the bandage runs wrist to elbow and the ash-rot still shows at the edges, grey-black and veined with something that catches the lamplight like crushed mica. Katerina is propped on three pillows by the hearth. Her breath is a shallow rasp Lenora counts in her sleep. Thirty-two a minute, sometimes thirty-four when the fever climbs. She is nineteen and she looks fifty, and what she wants to know is whether the snowdrops have come up yet. *"Don't lie to me, Len. Not you."* The healers call it mortis cineris, death by ash, and they say there is no cure. It took the girls' mother in the garden while Lenora stood barefoot in the turned soil and watched it climb from her mother's fingers to her elbows to her face, and while a shadow-fae stepped out from behind the lilac bush and offered to call it off in exchange for her voice for a year. She was seven. She said no. Her mother heard her say it, and said *good girl*, and then the wind came down off the mountains and scattered her across the marigold bed. The knock at the door is three sharp raps. The man on the step wears grey wool and silver buttons, and his eyes flicker gold at the edges, and the envelope he is holding is sealed with black wax pressed into the shape of a wolf's head. *"Lord Gideon Volk requests your presence at the Ash Court. Tomorrow evening, at the tolling of the seventh bell."* What Lenora signs, across a desk in the eastern tower, binds her freely to the Lord of the Ash Court for a period of one year and one day. What she finds inside those obsidian walls is a brooch shaped like twin flames, worn by more than one fae, and a bundle of letters her sister kept hidden, and a court where the truth can be pulled out of a person with a flame held close enough. A fae court romantasy about a blight that follows one bloodline, a bargain signed with both eyes open, and a woman who once refused a fae to his face and has to decide whether she can do it twice. The romance is closed-door.