Empire of Fangs

Ossoria is a city made of the dead. The arches of its cathedral are woven from the femurs of ancestors; its pillars are stacked vertebrae; the throne itself is bone. Rosalind Blackwood is the heir to it, and at midnight she is sitting at her brother's bedside counting a pulse that keeps getting slower. Edmund is seventeen. He has none of the necromancy that runs in their blood and never wanted any. He wanted to be a scholar and go south to the libraries. Instead there is a curse settling into his marrow, and Queen Mother Alda gives him another week, perhaps two. There is a cure. One drop of flame-mage blood, heated with ash-root, fed to him at the waning moon. The flame court will hand it over the day Rosalind marries into it. Then Rosalind does the arithmetic out loud. Alda says she has searched four years for a cure. Edmund only fell ill three months ago. Her grandmother does not flinch so much as settle, and admits it: she wove the curse herself, four years ago, to force the alliance. Six days. That is what Rosalind has, and the flame court's envoy is already at the gates. He is not an envoy. Darian Ashworth has come himself, copper-haired and unhurried, and he does not enter a hall like a man who has come to negotiate. What he offers is not marriage. A bone crown was stolen from the vault at Pyrrha and is sitting somewhere near the border crossing at Thornfall, and it amplifies curses. Three days in the Neutral Lands. She reads the traps her own people leave behind, he handles what fights back. On the fourth day he opens a vein for her brother and they never see each other again. She takes his hand on it in front of the whole court, and Lady Melisande Cruik smiles the way a person smiles at a mistake. What comes back over the border is not what set out. A bargain becomes a binding; a binding leaves flame magic burning under a necromancer's skin and a brand on her palm she cannot explain; and the crown is gone before they reach it, already sold to a merchant caravan. There is a girl at Thornfall with hair split white and red down the middle and eyes that do not match, and she matters more than the relic. A year later there is a cottage, a garden, mint tea, a brother who has learned how to laugh again, and a letter from a sorcerer that Rosalind has left folded under a pile of linens she never uses. A romantasy of court bargains, blood magic and two hostile bloodlines, ending in a life neither lead thought they were allowed. Closed-door romance.