Hunted to the Fae King

Elowen Vane is nine years old, and the grey mist has spread from her collarbone to the hollow of her throat in branching veins like winter trees under the skin. She can hear. She cannot answer. Dorian Hatch has been the only healer in Thornwick for forty years and he has a cure in his back cabinet, third shelf, behind the foxglove. He will not use it. It is fae-touched, and the village council passed a decree. So Merry does what the women in her family have always done, and opens her grandmother's journal. The remedy inside is called the Milk of Sorrow: night-blooming heather, the heartwood of a thorn tree, and milk from a mother who has lost a child. The heather grows only in the Thorn King's private garden. The heartwood can only be cut by a Border Knight. Merry walks to the thorn border to ask, and is arrested for it. The knight who arrests her is Alistair Thornwood. He is not the king and does not pretend to be. The Thorn King is a withered thing on a throne who has not spoken in years, and the court has been quietly rotting around his silence ever since. The bargain, when it comes, is not offered by Alistair. It is offered by Morwenna, the Lady of Silver Lies, who wants two things: Merry's blood, to study, and Merry's eyes inside Alistair's confidence. In exchange, Elowen lives. Merry has two days and the Milk of Sorrow takes one to prepare. She says yes because there is nothing else to say. Alistair's answer to that is the closest thing to kindness anyone offers her all book: *"I want you to give Morwenna enough truth to satisfy her, while we work together to find a real cure for your sister."* What neither of them expects is what Merry's blood turns out to be. Her mother Lilith was half-fae. Merry is more than that, and when Morwenna touches the cut she flinches like she has been burned, because she recognises the line it came from. This is a book about a girl who bargains to save her sister and finds out she is the thing being bargained for. It ends in a dead December garden with one red rose blooming in the frost, warm to the touch, and two people who have both lost something permanent deciding to stay anyway. A fae fantasy romance of court politics, poisoned wine and blood inheritance, with a closed-door love story and a hard-won, bittersweet ending.