The Golden Flame Lord

*Amber light caught the locket's edge as Rosamund Vane pressed it into her palm, the metal warm from her skin.* She has counted the steps. Fourteen seconds between the Dusk guards at the eastern door, twenty-two between the Flame Court sentries at the western stair. Nobody questions a healer crouched by a canal, and for three years that invisibility has been the one thing Rosamund cultivated. Tonight she means to spend all of it at once. Her sister Mirabel has a moon left. Maybe less. The black veins reached her throat this morning, and Mirabel has already asked her to stop forcing the medicines down. Then Hugh drops the vase too early, and the guards turn, and Rosamund is left standing in an antechamber with the man whose belt she came to rob. Prince Cinder Ashford is the younger son, the forge-prince, the one who works metal instead of politics. He tells her, without heat, how long she has been watching him, which way he shifts the pouch when he sits, how she timed the patrols and arranged for a childhood friend to break something at precisely the wrong moment. Then he does not call the guards. *If you need a healer's stone, you should ask.* He names a bridge and a time and tells her to come alone. And on his way out, almost as an afterthought: *Your friend. Hugh Thorn. He dropped the vase too early. I'd ask him why, if I were you.* The bargain that follows takes Rosamund out of Silvermere's endless dusk and along the road to Hearthstone, where forge-master archives may hold something that can burn the sickness out of Mirabel, where a High Lord holds council from a throne of black iron, and where Lenore Blackwood wears a gown of woven shadow and looks like a blade dressed for dinner. A district burns. A blood oath leaves a golden thread pulsing under Rosamund's palm, warm as a second heartbeat. A trapdoor hidden under cold ash in a forge hearth opens on a staircase down to the lower districts. And somewhere beneath stone there is an altar where a sun was bound a hundred years ago, and a reversal that calls for a willing sacrifice from a bloodline, offered and not taken. *Then we find out if that garden really exists. And if it doesn't, we plant one ourselves.* A fae romantasy of rival courts, forges, healers and thefts that go wrong, in which the curse holding the sun down and the curse eating a sister alive turn out to be the same bargain. The romance is closed-door.