Crown of Silver

Lena tilts the bowl and feeds the last of the frostfire stew to her brother. The yellow tint under Torben's skin has spread since yesterday, up from his collarbones, now creeping past his jaw. Bone-rot. There is one more serving in the pot and it is his, the way it is always his. Fallow Creek huddles under a sky the color of old iron. Thirty years of winter, and Lena has never smelled spring. Beyond the frozen river the Frostwood begins, black trees on white ground, and beyond it the ice spires of the Obsidian Palace catch the noon light like broken glass. Marta Graywood will not part with yarrow root. So Lena picks the lock on Marta's chest with a bent nail and a strip of leather, takes the map of the fae border folded inside it, and walks into the Frostwood alone with her father's dull hunting knife. A patrol finds her before she finds anything. At its head is a fae with ice-white hair and grey eyes. *I can smell the iron in your blood.* Rook Drystone is a commander in the Winter Queen's service. Fifteen winters ago he carried out an order that took a healer named Elara Marsten out of Fallow Creek, and he felt nothing while he did it, because by then he had nothing left to feel with. He had traded his heart to Venn Brightcloak after Lyra died. *He carved out my heart with a vow-knife, locked it in the Old Heart vault,* and gave him hollow strength in exchange. The mortal in his cell is Elara Marsten's daughter. Something in him cracks. What Lena wants is the Heartsbane, the healing relic she believes will cure Torben. What Rook tells her is worse than a locked door. *The Heartsbane isn't a weapon, Lena. It's a key.* It sits in the Old Heart behind a blood ward only Venn can open, and Venn has spent fifteen winters making sure no one can use it. So they travel together, and the Frostwood takes its cut: a wyvern out of the canopy, a tributary whose ice is thin where Rook cannot see it, a pool of black water, three miles of unmapped cave. Lena keeps a frostflower in her pocket that glowed when she touched it, and fire keeps rising in her hands that no mortal should have. Rook keeps discovering that he can feel the cold, the fear, and her. The Queen's heart is the true key, and breaking it breaks the winter. Someone has to carry that, and neither of them can stand what it costs the other. Romantasy: a mortal thief, a hollowed-out fae commander, and a thaw with a price attached. Closed-door.