The Shadow Thorn King

Rain has not fallen on Millbrook in six weeks. The market square stews under a sky the color of old pewter, two hundred bodies packed between the clothier's stall and the council dais, and Eamon Reed reads the last name off the scroll. *"Sorcha Hartley."* Riona checked the registry herself yesterday and her sister's name was not on it. Eamon says Sorcha walked to the town hall and entered it at quarter to midnight, and that he watched her do it. Sorcha has had lung-fever for weeks. She coughs blood into her pillow every night. The tithe is one firstborn from Millbrook every seven years, and it is the price of the boundary wards, and the treaty has held a hundred and twelve years while three other border towns were swallowed by the thorn hedges. Riona offers seven years of her own service in her sister's place. The council refuses, and produces a parchment to explain why: Mara Hartley came to them the night before she died and had them witness a contract giving the fae her firstborn daughter's service in exchange for a healing. The healing failed. The contract did not. Two steps below an obsidian throne, the prince watches the same selections and hears what his father actually wants with a dying girl. *"The immortality ritual requires a vessel of fae-touched blood."* Connell has ruled for three hundred years, and every fae in his court owes him a debt or a favor or a secret. The wards on the castle are tied to his blood. The ritual does not simply take a life, it binds the court to him, so if his son removes him without first undoing those bindings, the castle collapses, the border wards fall, and Millbrook burns. Lorcan Grey has his own reasons. His mother was human. She came to this court when it took her sister, tried to negotiate, and was offered a trade: her voice for her sister's life. She took it, and lived seven more years without speaking. Her portrait lies facedown in the bottom drawer of his desk, and he can sit and stare at the back of the frame for seven minutes without touching it. What reaches Riona is a letter written in ink that seems to shift and breathe, three words long. *I can help.* This is a fae romantasy about a debt collected in children, a half-human prince standing at the right hand of the thing he wants to kill, and a woman who was promised away at seven and has never once agreed to it. The heat is closed-door.