Promised to the Shadow King

*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.