Realm of Silver

The bird in Greer's arms is still warm. A thorn caught it mid-flight and opened its throat, and the blood has dried into the grey breast feathers in a pattern that looks almost like a rune. She raised that bird from a fledgling and taught it to find her sister's window no matter how far it flew. Her grandmother's rhyme does not open the Thornwood. *Thorn and bone, let me pass alone.* The wall of spines hums and does not move. So Greer cuts her palm open along an old scar and presses it to the branches, and the thorns recoil like she has pressed a brand to living skin. Her sister Tamsin is dying. Her hands shake around a cup, bruises bloom on her arms for no reason, and the healer says there is no cure while the priest says pray and the village elder says the only cure grows in the heart of the wood, guarded by the Court of Bone and Thorn, and that no mortal who went looking for it ever came back. At the antler gate she meets the Warden. Rhys Blackthorn has one silver eye and one black one, thorns pushing up through his shoulders like bones through skin, and he is beautiful the way a blade is beautiful. He does not give her the cure. He gives her terms. Survive three nights in his court. Do not break, do not run, do not die. On the morning of the fourth day he will listen to her plea. The bone ring he slides onto her finger will tighten until the bone snaps if she tries to leave before then, and getting through the gate at all has already cost her a year of her life. Within the walls there is Bram, a gnarled gardener with moss trailing from his collar, who tells her which doors to avoid. There is Sable Vex, crow-haired and sharp as a filleting knife, who offers her a warmer blanket and wants something else entirely. And there is Queen Morwen, whose hair is white thorns that writhe like serpents, watching from a balcony carved out of rib and sinew and saying nothing at all, because she does not need to. The court is starving. The forest smells of grief. And the price of what Greer came for keeps getting quoted in a currency she has already started spending. A fae court romantasy about bargains, blood debts and a woman who came to trade for her sister's life. Closed-door.