The Broken Shadow Lord

She was supposed to be the instrument, not the accused. Four years of hearing the difference between a truth and a lie for a court that owns her, and all of it in exchange for hours shaved off her brother's sentence. Grey light bleeds through the slitted window high in Orla's cell and she is already lacing her boots when the guard's key scrapes the lock. She knows what it means before he says a word. The Night of Shifting Masks begins at dusk, and the king always clears his accounts before a celebration. Her cell holds nothing worth securing. A straw pallet. A chipped basin. A candle stub and the worn leather journal where she keeps Tobin's drawings. The corridors of Thornhollow twist through the mountain's bones like veins in a fist. Obsidian swallows the torchlight before it can travel three paces and the air tastes of cold stone and the mineral bite of the black lakes in the caverns below. Four years down here, and she still dreams about open sky. If she tells the truth, a man loses a father. If she lies and the court finds out later, they take her memories: Tobin's face, Tobin's laugh, the drawings pressed into her hands through the bars of a holding cell. They would take her brother's name out of her head and she would forget she ever had a reason to keep going. In the hall she sees the crack in a shadow that should not have one. And Drennan Ashvale, who wears no mask, not even tonight. Ink-black hair loose past his shoulders, silver at the temples, one eye where there should be two. *I require your presence at a private audience. You will come with me now.* What follows: a poisoned chalice, a prisoner in the deep, a shadow healer, a lord who vanished and the reason nobody will say his name, a midnight rendezvous, and a hunt through the caverns below. *I love your stubbornness and your courage and the way you look at the world like it owes you something.* The curse is still coiled in his chest at the end of this book. The socket still throbs. None of that changes the arrangement he has privately made with himself, which is that the next person to reach for what is his will not survive the reaching.