Sworn to the Shadow Crown

Dawn should have brought mercy. Cordelia Ashford has not moved from her brother's bedside in six hours, and the tweezers have begun to shake in her fingers. The ivy threads she pulled out of Thomas's throat lie in a saucer on the nightstand, pale and slick, pulsing as though they might root in the porcelain by noon. The black veins have branched beneath his jaw. His bandaged hand leaks a thin gold sap that smells of crushed marigolds and something rotting underneath. The healer has fled. Margaret Holt fills the doorway in grey wool, a pinky finger missing from the hand she rests on the frame, and says what Cordelia already knows. *Still alive, then.* Barely. One name is left, and Cordelia has not spoken it aloud in three years: the boy who taught her to skip stones on the river, who kissed her once beneath the willow where the fireflies gathered, then walked into the Thornwood after his father's funeral and came back something else. Julian Blackwood receives her at a manor that rises out of the Thornwood like a broken ribcage, its table legs wrapped in ivy. The darkness clings to him and lags a half-second behind when he moves. His eyes are silver. A thick white scar crosses his throat, and it was her grandfather who gave it to him. *You came here expecting a villain, Miss Ashford,* he says. *But I'm just a man who was born into a broken pact, carrying a curse that isn't mine.* His price is a year of service: a year in which he can ask anything and she cannot refuse. What he offers back is not a cure. It is a single day, twenty-four hours in which Thomas will wake and speak and eat while the ivy holds still. And each day Julian pushes it back, the shade bound to his bloodline takes payment from him. A memory. A sensation. A piece of who he is. Mira has been collecting those pieces for a very long time. So has someone nearer to the Ashford hearth, who has been feeding the ivy for sixteen years and gave a finger to the Shadow Court for the privilege. Cordelia carries her father's blood in a sealed vial against her skin, and Alistair Finch has told her what it might buy. To break the binding she must spill Blackwood blood at the source in the Thornwood, and pay with her shadow, and her soul with it. Before the ivy is finished with either house she will tear a hole in the veil, and the question will stop being what the pact demands and start being what two people choose when nothing is forcing them: *Not by blood. Not by pact. Not because a curse binds us or because a shade demands tribute.* A gothic romantasy of blood-debts, cursed bloodlines and an old estate going green at the edges, closed-door, ending on bare hands in a garden.