Realm of Ash and Ruin

The bandage comes away with blood and something worse — a black thread of rot that clings to the fabric like a live thing. Elowen folds it before her sister can see it. Rosamund watches anyway. *"You're out of foxglove. I can smell the empty jar from here."* Three weeks ago it was a thin cut on Rosamund's forearm, the kind that should have healed in a day. Instead it festered black, and the veins have been creeping toward her shoulder ever since like roots under the skin. Every herbalist in Hearthwood has looked at it and had nothing. Elowen has spent her mother's silver, traded her father's hunting knife, and promised favours she cannot yet name. Then Margot comes up the stairs, hitting the loose third step the way she always does, and drops a folded paper on the bed. A relic. A cup, one of the old Ash King's treasures, said to heal anything. The location of the last known owner. *"You want to save her. I want to watch you try."* The address is a crossroads outside town. The name is Corin Blackwood, Ash Lord — the one who killed the old Ash King in a duel five years ago, took the throne, and then vanished behind walls of obsidian and ash trees while the Winter Court circled his territory. Elowen crosses the border uninvited. Lucian Vane is waiting in the throne room to call her a spy in front of the whole court. What Corin puts on the table instead is a trade. The cup was shaped from the first ash tree; it can heal any wound and break any curse. Help him retrieve it, and he will use it on Rosamund before the next new moon. Three days, then, of trusting a man with silver blood and ash-grey eyes and a duelling scar across his collarbone. There is a cellar with a skeleton in it. There is a forged message designed to separate them. There is a birthmark on Elowen's wrist whose runes match a key that should not exist. And there is the thing Corin knows and does not say: what a shadow of his was doing near a barn in her village on the day Rosamund was cut. When she finally hits him for it, the sound echoes. This is a fae court romantasy about a bargain struck over a dying sister, a lord who has spent years pretending he is not a king, and a human woman who turns out to be the most dangerous thing in the room. The romance is closed-door.