The Ruin King's Cursed Bride

Rosa finds her brother's pulse before the infirmary door has finished swinging shut. Forty beats in thirty seconds. Eighty per minute. Below ninety means the soul-fire is guttering. The spark crystal hanging over Leo's cot has dimmed to the colour of weak tea. She replaced it yesterday. It should have lasted a week. Dr Penhallow calls it soul-fire atrophy. No known cause. No known cure. The crystal lanterns buy time and nothing else, and the wasting is accelerating. So Rosa needs a Grade Seven crystal out of the vault, the kind reserved for the Forge's main crucible, the kind you need the Master's seal to draw. Constance Hargrave holds the seal, and Constance has the dawn shift. Rosa learned the ducts behind every room in the Spark Forge when she was fourteen, after the older journeymen locked her in the scullery for a prank she had not committed. She gets the crystal. What she has not planned for is the man leaning in the vault doorway with his hands in his coat pockets, watching her take it. Julian Crow has a proposition. Out in the Ruin Marches there is a void mage holding the only complete formula for the thing that is killing Leo, and he will trade it for exactly one thing: safe passage across the border, with a guide who knows the smuggler routes and the Forge patrol schedules. *"Because you're desperate enough to say yes."* Rosa sets a single condition. If this is a trap, if he is working for whoever framed him, *"I'll kill you before you can blink."* *"Midnight. Bring supplies for a week. Don't tell anyone."* What Julian does not say on that road is that he is carrying a folded note written in a hand he recognises, and that the woman who wrote it does not want Leo cured. She wants his root, the thing that burns in a mage's chest and feeds the spark. If she gets it, Leo will not simply die. There will be nothing left to bury. A court romantasy of fire magic and void magic: a bargain struck over a stolen crystal, a border crossing dressed up as an extradition, and a new moon counting down. The romance is closed-door.