The Savage Flame King

Sabina has seen men burn before. She presses her back against a blackwood trunk still warm from the last border skirmish and tries not to think about how she knows that particular smell. The woodland between Ash and Flame was oaks and ironwood once. Now it is toothpicks and cinders and old smoke. For three weeks the reports have said the same thing: villages along the border stripped of their young, the trail running into Flame territory. Her mother's council has called for war twice. Sabina held them off and demanded proof. Her scout Kael, nineteen years old with fresh ash-scale spreading across his jaw, comes back with it. A patrol camped in the old quarry under the Burnell standard, and prisoners bound at the wrists and ankles. Doran Flint has invited himself along on this mission. He wants Sabina's post as Warden of Secrets, keeper of the Ash Court's intelligence, and he has been arranging her small failures for a while now. A late report. A missing manifest. Nothing she can prove. She steps into the open and tells the Flame patrol to release the prisoners and stand down. Then the tent opens and a man comes out with no armor at all: black hair cropped short, amber eyes, a red cloak pinned with a silver flame in a ring of iron, and knuckles ruined into scar tissue from practising fire magic without gloves. Alaric Burnell, Flame Prince. What Sabina finds at that quarry is not what either court has been told. There is a symbol on a piece of charred cloth, three interlocking circles, slightly off-centre. She has seen it in her mother's grimoire, locked in an iron chest she was forbidden to open. Her brother Jasper is in the east tower where the morning sun can reach him, because the healers say it slows the blight. Their father died of the ash blight. Their grandmother. Their great-uncle. Jasper is next, and he has started hearing something call to him at night. And in the Ash Court, Doran has a collar with old wardings etched into it and two words to go with it. *"Marry me."* A fae court fantasy romance about a spymaster, a fire mage and an inherited sickness neither court will name honestly. The romance is closed-door.