The Forbidden Frost King

A single candle flame bends sideways as Marianne presses her palm to the guard's chest. His name is Thorne, and she learned that from the stretcher-bearers rather than from him. He was found alone at the eastern post, standing there, not moving, until he fell over. Half-frozen. His mouth, his fingers. The fingertips are white and the nails are going blue, and it is the Season of Embers in the Dusk Court, when the air tastes of warm earth and ripe fruit. Marianne sends her shadows into the puncture below his ribs and they come back frayed. What is in that wound is cold that seeks, cold that burrows into her magic like a worm through an apple. Frost magic, in Dusk territory, where the Edict of Boundaries has held for three hundred years. And down the hall, her sister is coughing. Eliz has been coughing more than usual for three days, sleeping badly, going pale, and Marianne finds her on the floor beside the nightstand with the ribbon from her braid snapped in two. The wasting took their grandmother. It is taking Eliz now, and nothing in any Dusk pharmacopoeia touches it. Which is how Marianne comes to open the iron-bound chest at the bottom of her wardrobe, the one with her mother's initials cut into the lid and a promise attached to it. *Burn it all. Promise me you'll never open it.* Lydia Croft was the best healer the Dusk Court had. She was also buying frost-thistle from somebody in Ashfall, the neutral pass between the courts, and there is a folded letter inside that chest in elegant handwriting that is not hers, on paper with a watermark Marianne does not recognise. The man who sells frostbloom in the Ashfall market has a cracked iris and a name. *"My name is Aldric Vance. If you want to save your sister, you'll trust me for one night."* One night on Frost soil, under Frost law, healing a scout who has been convulsing for two hours while a captain with frost in his beard calls her a liability and Aldric answers that she is his debt. What neither of them has worked out yet is why a Frost scout and a Dusk guard have the same clean puncture wound, who is putting it there, and why a man called Percival Ashford has been hunting a sick girl for months. A fae court romantasy about a healer who breaks a three-hundred-year treaty for her sister, a merchant who is not a merchant, two broken Hearts, and a war that somebody is deliberately restarting. The romance is closed-door.