The Frozen Flame Lord

Cressida Balthazar counts the heartbeats between tremors with her palm flat on the stone of the Ivy Market Bridge. Below her the Blackrun River runs ash-grey. Above her the caldera's eternal flame burns over the terraced city of Emberwall. The dealer she has come to meet calls himself Three-Finger Tom, and he will not take her three silver marks. *"Silver's dead currency."* He wants blood, and he already knows why she is desperate: *"Your sister's dying, isn't she? Marchetta, the pretty one with the ivy veins."* The Blight is in Marchetta's lungs. Cressida gives up one drop to a silver lancet and takes the vial. She has three weeks. Maybe four. Then the bridge groans in a way she knows is not settling, and the center span cracks, and a child is screaming, and Cressida does the one thing she has spent her life hiding. Captain Dorian Valcourt comes through the parting crowd with his sword drawn and his face unreadable. *"You're under arrest, Cressida Balthazar."* Practicing forbidden magic. Using flame magic in a public thoroughfare. What arrives in her cell is not an execution order. It is a summons in the Queen's own hand, pairing her with Gideon Rosencross, the ambitious alchemist from the outer terraces, and commanding both of them to find a cure and report at dawn in the alchemy tower. Vasilia Thorn knows exactly what Cressida is, and wants it anyway. Dorian is the man who stood still and let her father's ivy whip open his face during the trial, and never explained why. He has his own missing piece: a sister, Elara, a researcher in the Queen's alchemy corps who was studying the Blight and thought she was close, and who he says is dead. Then Cressida finds a small vial behind a stack of journals, labeled in her father's handwriting with Elara's name and the words last dose, and she puts it in her pocket without telling him. Below the city the Blight is eating the roots that hold the stone together. Inside the palace the Queen's daughter, Princess Rosalind, walks Cressida away from her escort for a private word. And inside Cressida there is a fire she learned to spend on candles and warming her sister's tea, which is not what it was made for. This is a romantasy of court politics, alchemy and a rot with a heart of its own, in which the bargain a woman strikes to save her sister costs more than the blood she paid on the bridge. It opens a series and it does not close every door behind it. The heat is closed-door.