Hunted to the Fae Court

Rosalind Harlow presses a folded cloth against an Ash prisoner's side and counts to ten, willing her left hand to hold still. The tremor starts in her wrist, travels through her fingers, and ends in the cloth's edge fluttering like a moth wing. She is an Ivy Court healer. He is the enemy. That is how this is supposed to work. Then she sees the mark on his wrist. Rosalind's brother Brannon has been turning to stone since the morning his hand stopped halfway to the butter dish and his fingers went grey. She has spent the three months since tearing through the Ivy Court's archives, bribing clerks, stealing into locked rooms, hunting a Vance forge-seal her own court confiscated after a border skirmish five years ago. *"The cure Brannon needed. Right here, on the wrist of a man who would rather die than help her."* Sebastian Vance was twelve when Ivy raiders burned his family's forge. He hid in the catacombs and listened. He has no reason on this island to hand an Ivy healer anything at all. So they do the only thing that will hold. *"The Rite of Cantle is the only way two fae from opposite courts can work together without one of us eventually betraying the other."* Blood mixing. Ash leaves and ivy roots. A mark on the palm that neither of them can take off, and that neither of them can explain to their own people. It hands Lady Winifred Vale exactly what she needs. Rosalind has been trying to earn that woman's approval for seven years, and Winifred has been waiting just as long for something she can say out loud in front of the Curative Circle. And none of it touches the older bargain. Before any of this, a dying elder pressed a single pressed ash leaf into a boy's bloody palm in a forge that had been cold for three days, and told him what the fire would charge him. The prophecy does not name a man. It names a bloodline. And every time that blood truly loves somebody, the fire comes for the person they love most. An enemies-to-lovers fae romantasy of two warring courts, a petrifying curse, a rite that cannot be undone, and two people who each have a very good reason to betray the other. The romance is closed-door.