Bound to the Fae King

The healer's daughter is sent to beg, because the village has worked out that her life is the cheapest thing it currently owns. Orlaith MacBride scrapes the last of the feverfew into her apron pocket and steps out of her father's cottage into a grey-purple dusk smelling of woodsmoke and somebody's recent bloodletting. The thorn border at the edge of Thornhaven hums like a harp string left too long to vibrate. She has spent her entire life learning not to touch it. Tonight they send her through it. Her father has been dying for eight hundred and ninety-seven days. She has counted every one. Every soul in Thornhaven knew it was not inevitable. Every soul except her. Tadhg Byrne has not needed anything from a mortal in a very long time. He is owed a debt by every living thing inside that border and he collects in the only currency that has ever held here: bargains, struck in blood, honoured precisely to the letter and never one syllable beyond it. He expects a frightened girl. He gets a healer who reads the terms before she signs them. What follows is a bargain neither can break. A bloodstorm that traps them in the same cave. A herb exchange conducted like a negotiation between hostile states. An apology delivered in the rain by somebody who has never previously needed to make one. A test at the Thorn Fortress, a kiss in the dust, and an oath sworn at the exact midpoint of everything, when it is much too late to pretend either of them is still merely transacting. Then the blight mark begins to answer the ground, and Orlaith understands what she has actually agreed to. *Tadhg lied to me. He hurt me. He let me believe my father's death was inevitable when—* She does not finish the sentence, because the messenger arrives first, voice ragged: *The Summer Court has broken the agreement. The human's father was taken from the cottage five minutes ago.* There is a spy in the fortress and a poisoned cup already poured. Thornhaven will want to know what she gave away. It will not want to know what he did. And a fae king's word, honoured exactly, has never once meant mercy.