Realm of Flame

Rosalind Ashford counts the last of her coins for the third time, the copper edges biting into her palm, while her brother Leo works through the family sword forms on the pier behind her. Thirty-seven. Not enough. Not nearly enough. She takes the purse to the harbormaster anyway. *Leo's conscription papers. I need them to disappear.* Garrick Vane hefts it once and laughs at her. The order is already signed and sealed with the Queen's stag, antlers crowned with stars. Leo Ashford, Fourth Scout Company, report by the new moon. Ten days. Vane does offer her one substitution. The Heart of Solstice: the ancient artifact locked in the Starvault on Ember Island, a relic that can recharge any mage's gem regardless of their bond. Nobody has breached the Starvault in fifty years. The Queen has wanted it for years. And the man already hunting it sails into Port Tiderun that same night, under a black hull and a flag bearing a crescent moon pierced by a single star. Caspian Nightfall. Grey eyes, a silver-white scar across his throat, and the face her family blames for the fire. The man who walked out of the Ashford manor while her father's body was still cooling on the floor. *I'm a failed fire mage with thirty-seven coppers to my name. I can barely keep my own brother fed.* He offers a truce anyway, freely and without condition: she helps him reach the Heart, he gets her brother out. Neither of them plans on the shard of star-metal that ends up lodged in both their chests, a silver thread that pulls taut when one walks too far from the other and will not let go until the moon completes her cycle. Maren Sullivane, who once wrote to Rosalind offering to buy the Ashford debts if she would spy on her own household, is circling the Queen, whispering, trying to earn her place as the favourite. And in a captain's desk there is a cracked leather logbook with a child's handwriting in it, and an order for accelerant, paid in full, no questions asked. Rosalind was nine. She has spent sixteen years letting everyone believe somebody else burned the Ashford estate to the ground. *We're both guilty. That's why we fit.* A romantasy of harbours, gem-bound mages and warring houses, with a conscription notice, a vault nobody has cracked in fifty years, a forced magical tether, a Queen who wanted a family's land, and a truth the heroine has been outrunning since she was a child. The heat is closed-door.