Throne of Silver

A strip of linen, once white and now stained yellow-brown, unspools across Lenora Voss's lap. She measures the rot's advance by how much cloth it eats. Three days ago a handspan covered her sister's forearm. Tonight the bandage runs wrist to elbow and the ash-rot still shows at the edges, grey-black and veined with something that catches the lamplight like crushed mica. Katerina is propped on three pillows by the hearth. Her breath is a shallow rasp Lenora counts in her sleep. Thirty-two a minute, sometimes thirty-four when the fever climbs. She is nineteen and she looks fifty, and what she wants to know is whether the snowdrops have come up yet. *"Don't lie to me, Len. Not you."* The healers call it mortis cineris, death by ash, and they say there is no cure. It took the girls' mother in the garden while Lenora stood barefoot in the turned soil and watched it climb from her mother's fingers to her elbows to her face, and while a shadow-fae stepped out from behind the lilac bush and offered to call it off in exchange for her voice for a year. She was seven. She said no. Her mother heard her say it, and said *good girl*, and then the wind came down off the mountains and scattered her across the marigold bed. The knock at the door is three sharp raps. The man on the step wears grey wool and silver buttons, and his eyes flicker gold at the edges, and the envelope he is holding is sealed with black wax pressed into the shape of a wolf's head. *"Lord Gideon Volk requests your presence at the Ash Court. Tomorrow evening, at the tolling of the seventh bell."* What Lenora signs, across a desk in the eastern tower, binds her freely to the Lord of the Ash Court for a period of one year and one day. What she finds inside those obsidian walls is a brooch shaped like twin flames, worn by more than one fae, and a bundle of letters her sister kept hidden, and a court where the truth can be pulled out of a person with a flame held close enough. A fae court romantasy about a blight that follows one bloodline, a bargain signed with both eyes open, and a woman who once refused a fae to his face and has to decide whether she can do it twice. The romance is closed-door.