Kingdom of Ruin

A brass locket sits open on Marisol Vane's dressing table, tarnished at the hinge. Inside, a lock of silver-white hair curls against a scrap of faded blue silk - Celestine's hair, from before the sickness. Marisol snaps the locket shut and presses it into her palm until the edges bite. The pain helps her think. Her sister is coughing blood again. Silver-sickness has no cure in Silvermere; the archives are empty and the shadow mages can only slow it. The one thing that might reverse it is the Heartfire, and the Heartfire sits inside Emberforge, in the keeping of House Ember, which is to say in the keeping of the family that ruined hers. *"You're asking me to walk into a slaughterhouse and hand the butcher a knife,"* says Harlan, watching her from the doorway with his pocket watch ticking against his thigh. She goes anyway. Midnight blue gown, silver constellations stitched across the bodice, House Argent colours worn into an Ember hall on purpose. Marisol was seven the last time she was in that building. She lay flat behind a velvet curtain and listened to Bramwell Caeris tell her father that the price of her sister's life was Marisol herself, pledged to marry his son. Her father refused. Then he died on the floor of the negotiating room while she held his cold hand, and her own hands began to glow, orange-red, embers banked in ash. Ember magic. The magic of the enemy house. Dante Caeris is Bramwell's heir, the boy with amber eyes who once stared at her across a banquet hall and said nothing. He is also the only person who can get her near the Heartfire, and he wants something in return. What follows is a bargain, a set of trials, a hidden third chamber Harlan found misfiled among shipping manifests in the Silvermere archives, and a lesson Dante gives her that begins with how to stop pretending. Seraphina Blackwood, crescent-moon brooch at her collar, has been working toward her own alliance with House Ember for three years and can tell at a glance that the stitching on a guild messenger's collar is wrong. Bramwell can still fill a room by entering it. And the fire, everyone warns, takes payment from someone. A romantasy of feuding houses in the Dusklands, closed-door, ending with a dying sister, a changed pair of eyes, a wedding, and a letter sealed with a wolf's head howling at a frozen moon.