Realm of Ruin

A bead of blood wells on Cora Thistlewood's pricked finger and falls onto a duchess's burgundy silk. It sizzles. The fabric smokes, the blood vanishes, and what remains is *a faint scorch mark, the size of a sixpence*. She wipes her hand on her apron and goes back to the hem. The gown has to be finished tonight. Her sister needs medicine. *The shop smelled of beeswax and old wool.* Outside, *Edinburgh's September fog pressed against the glass like a living thing.* Then a boy knocks with a folded paper sealed in red wax, a flame encircled by a serpent. *Your sister is my guest. She is well, for now.* Come alone. Tell no one. *The gate opens at midnight. Do not be late.* The signature reads Lord Pyre Vane. Cora is twenty-three, a seamstress living above her shop on Candlemaker Row, greying early from worry. Poppy is twelve, sick with croup, and was supposed to be safe at Miss Finch's Academy. Cora has spent her life pretending the heat under her palms means nothing. Pyre Vane knows better. He crouched beside her once outside a burning house and told her what she was: *You are Emberkin, little spark. Fire-blood.* Before she reaches the gate, a hard-handed soldier with ember-lit eyes pins her in an alley. *You are coming with me, spy.* His name is Duncan Forrester, he is a general of the Ember Court, and for reasons he does not explain, he lets her go. The gate is under Greyfriars Kirkyard and it opens for her blood. Below it waits a realm of obsidian under an amber sky, the Council of Ash in grey robes, and King Alarik on a throne of basalt, a court that looks at Cora and sees a remnant it believed it had already burned. By the next morning she is in a cell charged with espionage, and Duncan is the only voice raised in her defense. *He has not argued for anyone's life since his brother died.* Malcolm went to the pyre for treason on evidence Duncan carried to the Council himself. The King offers one way out: the Trial of Cinders, not invoked in forty years, in which she must bring the cinder-rose back out of the vent. And surviving it only sharpens the harder questions. Who her mother really was. Why Duncan is rotting from the inside with a wasting the Court calls ash-blight. What Pyre Vane wants badly enough to take a coughing child as collateral. A fantasy romance that runs from foggy, gaslit Edinburgh into a court of fire, built on a wary, slow-earned partnership between a seamstress whose flame turns out to heal as well as burn and a soldier who has been burning himself out with guilt. The romance is closed-door.