Throne of Venom

The rain has been falling since dawn and still they make her stand in it. At the graveside, Rosalind Ashford does the one thing she has been told never to do. She looks. Her grandmother is standing beside her own grave, barefoot in the mud, her burial shroud hanging open at the front. *The fingers passed through the rain without disturbing it.* Rosalind screams. In the entry hall afterward, the bottom drawer of the sideboard is unlocked, a length of iron chain comes out, and it goes around her forearm once, twice, three times while she is told exactly what she is. *It's not a gift. It's not a blessing from the old gods. It's a sickness, a corruption, a thing that must be controlled.* She is grown now, and being laced into a corset at Thornhall while the Smoke delegation crosses the Ironbridge at dawn. Her sister Phoebe has been humming since before daylight, because the vizier asked for her hand at first sight, in a letter *sealed in Smoke wax, black as pitch, she said, with a raven pressed into it.* Rosalind knows better. What viziers actually pick, she thinks, is *territory, resources, leverage.* She also knows that three nights ago the chapel was empty and the pews were full of ghosts, Thornhall soldiers with their throats slit and their eyes still wet. And that Lady Morwen has ears in every corridor, and that binding is not a threat in this house but a promise kept warm in a pocket. The treaty blade waits on a velvet cushion in the great hall. So does one member of the delegation standing slightly apart from the rest: lean, skin the grey of river stone after rain, left hand wrapped in black linen from knuckle to wrist, eyes the pale yellow of a dying fire. *My name is Connall Vex.* *And I think we have a problem.* He came for the blade and found a copy with no flaw in it. She saw a woman in grey pouring death into a well. So, impossibly, did he. And somewhere behind all of it is a six-year-old girl named Cinder, held by the Smoke queen as the price of bringing the real blade home. A fantasy romance of court treaties, iron bindings and a thing made of ash and ember, about a woman told her whole life that her sight is a sickness, and the one person who saw the same vision she did. The romance is closed-door.