Crown of Flame

Tom Price is four years old and his face is going from blue to gray. Morwen Caldwell kneels beside him with a pouch of feverfew and tells his mother he will be all right, because that is what you tell a mother. She learned years ago that certainty was a medicine all its own. Then, through the open casement, on the wind coming off Black Hill, she hears her sister calling her name. By the time Morwen reaches the ring of standing stones the old people called the Fairy Circle, Ivy is already inside it. A pale, long-fingered hand comes through the shimmering air and closes on her wrist, and then the ring is empty. Nobody walks into the Court of Thorn and Dusk for nothing. The fae who took Ivy wears *a collar of thorns that touched his jaw*, and when Morwen comes after her sister he offers terms instead of an apology: *You're bound to my household until the year is complete, or until your sister is freed.* Rhys, the smith whose wife Elinor went through that same ring eight years ago, tells her she has just signed her life away. Morwen says she has bought three days. She goes through the hill as a healer, and her patient is Cethin Ashford. The Thorn Knight. The queen's son, collared by his own mother's magic, unable to die and unable to hold on to himself. *I've been alive for three hundred years, and I remember maybe fifty of them.* Above them both sits Queen Cyra, on a throne of interwoven thorn and bone, wearing a crown of living thorns that bite into her scalp. Beside her stands Eluned, who says *I keep a watch on everything* and who has her own view about which of the old blood should be sitting on that throne. And somewhere behind Cethin's silence is Emrys, the brother who was seventeen, arrested over forbidden texts from the queen's library, who spoke of a key and did not live to use it. There is also the thing Cethin has not told her, and when he finally does, it lands like a shove to the chest. *I know where Ivy is because I took her.* What follows is a mortal woman with dirt under her fingernails moving through a court that has never had a use for mortals: an iron nail pressed into her palm by a village woman, a bracelet of black thorns that will not come off, a man who says she is the first person in a hundred years who made him want to remember tomorrow, and a crown nobody knows how to remove without killing the wearer. Crown of Flame is a fae-court fantasy romance about sisters, bargains and curses, closed-door, ending in a garden in Ashbourne with an iron ring and a sky that is neither dawn nor dusk.