The Forbidden Flame Court

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.