Realm of Frost and Ash

Lira has two minutes to cross a room booby-trapped by people who have spent centuries perfecting the art of killing fire-touched intruders. Her left hand still throbs where the frost-trap seized her. That is not the part that frightens her. The part that frightens her is that her own fire shrank from the trap like a dog shown a whip, and she got the thing open with ice magic that should not have been possible in her hands. No time for that. Tobin's lungs are worse. Tobin has three weeks, maybe four. The frost-heart herb is rare enough that Volcara's best healers have never seen one and potent enough to cure frost-sickness before it reaches a man's marrow. She gets her fingers around the stem. The runes under her feet come alive, and the room begins to scream. The man in the doorway does not shout. He has silver-white hair, no armour, no drawn weapon, and one sentence. *You're fire-touched.* Dorian Vane is the heir of the Frost Court, and there is something in his left coat pocket hot enough to start the leather smoking. What he wants is not a prisoner. Three years ago his father vanished the night he tried to say something about fire and frost that did not mix. His uncle told the court it was a hunting accident, took control, locked the treasury and stopped every expedition into the Wildwood. Behind a loose stone in his father's study, Dorian found a fire-stone and a half-burned letter about a meeting in a Wildwood library, and a name that was not a Frost Court name. Rina Fenn. Lira's mother. So it becomes a transaction, not a partnership. She helps him into a library whose door has no handle and no hinges and opens only to the name of someone buried inside. He hands over the vial that keeps her brother alive. What neither of them plans on: Kaelin Crowe folding a report into a square and sealing it with Ash Court wax, twenty paces back in the dawn light. A one-eyed healer named Mira Voss who claims to know the Wildwood better than anyone alive. A flooded tunnel. A fire-stone passed across a dying fire because *I need you alive tomorrow.* And blood that crosses between them and does not go back where it came from, so that his fire survives in her and her frost lives in him. The Accord that keeps the two courts apart was written for a reason, and the reason is not the one either court teaches. Tobin's sickness is not what it looks like either. By the end, one of them has to give up the only power they have ever known, and the voice that asks for it is not asking twice. Romantasy across two enemy courts, with a theft, a buried archive, a bargain neither party trusts, and an ending that costs, and it is closed-door.