Empire of Flame

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.