Empire of Ash

Seven years after her father's death, Rowena Ashford walks the thorn-hedge alone before dawn and finds a section of it gone grey and brittle. Not rot. *It was a surgical slice, straight and even, as if made by a sharp blade held in a steady hand.* Someone has carved a tunnel through the living wall that guards Thorn Court, working from the inside. Then the mist over the Cinder River opens and a storm-silver barge comes through it, and Aldric Vance is standing at the prow, watching her. Rowena is the Thorn King's daughter and she has no authority at all. Her father's coronet sits on Gareth's head now. What she has is thorn-magic in her blood, a pruning knife strapped to her thigh, and a younger sister: Morwenna, who cries when she steps on snails and wants to be a healer, and who has just been signed away without being asked to Aldric's cousin Harren. Aldric crossed the water to tell her that himself. He is a Storm prince with a thin white scar across his jaw and wind that answers his open hands, and he suspects everyone, Rowena included. What begins as two people who want the same man exposed stops being only that in a cave, when Rowena draws a blade across her own palm to pull poison out of a wound in Aldric's back. Her mother's blood-song works. It also leaves a mark neither of them chose, humming *low and constant, like a second heartbeat*, carrying his pain into her ribs and her grief into his. The thing they are really chasing is older than the betrothal. A silver medallion torn from an intruder's throat, etched with a hedge cut cleanly in two. A journal of poison recipes in her mother's hand. A ledger kept in Storm Court by Aldric's cousin Serilda, with an entry for the East Gate. All the while, Gareth burns her mother's cuttings, has her arrested for treason, and holds Morwenna's life over her the way a man holds a knife, which in a chapel with a Storm lord at the altar and drugged wine in her blood is precisely what it becomes. *"I paid men to kill your father. There's a difference."* This is court-intrigue romantasy: thorn magic against storm magic, two courts across one grey river, a bond that neither lead asked for, a sister worth burning a kingdom over, and a truce that ends up being signed on the bridge between the shores. Closed-door.