The Vicious Thorn Queen

Dawn breaks grey and thin over the borderlands, and Katerina Volkov has already failed twice. The first attempt left her on a ledge three feet down with blood in her mouth. The second cost an hour and a pint of blood for a silverthorn whose flowers had already dropped. The vines she climbs on are her own magic, and they feed on her blood, and the silverthorn she still needs is forty feet above her with its flowers tight and white. She needs the sap for her brother. Misha's hands shake too hard to hold a cup now. He can't write. He can't thread a needle to mend his own coat, and he had always been proud of that, of being useful. The ash-rot has put grey into his lips, and the silverthorn is a delaying tactic, not a cure. Enough sap buys him another month. Maybe two, if she measures the doses carefully. The black rash on her own arms crept past her wrists last week, dark lines branching under the skin like frozen lightning. That is what her magic costs her. And the silverthorn is guarded. The thing on the ledge above her has no flesh — bone and ash frozen into ragged fur, ribs showing through it, pale blue light burning in the eye sockets. What comes out of the fog afterwards is a man in a cracked silver mask who pours ash potion down her throat and seals a wound that should have killed her. In the Grand Duchess's thorn-hall, Katerina learns his name and his price. *The Heart of Ash lies in the bone grove beyond the petrified forest. It's a relic of my grandmother's line. Retrieve it with me, and I will give you the cure for ash-rot.* *And why would a Kostoran prince help a Thorn Court mage?* *Because I want the relic, and you want your brother alive.* Misha coughs blood into his palm while they are still negotiating. Katerina takes the bargain, and the bargain takes far more than she agreed to hand over: a month of her life for one working, a thin white scar over her sternum for another, and in the end the hollow place where her magic used to live. A closed-door witch romantasy of blood-fed thorn magic, two courts bound by an old curse, a relic in a bone grove, and a bargain neither side makes in good faith.