The Broken Ash Queen

*Are you quite finished admiring it, Miss Ashford?* The merchant leans across the table with his waxed moustache and his velvet coat and breath that carries pickled eggs and the smug certainty that he is wasting his time on a half-fae reader who cannot possibly deliver. The ember-stone in the brass dish is cold, dead and useless. Mara picks it up anyway and rolls it between her fingers while a clockwork regulator chimes seven bells somewhere in the depths of the guild reading room. *The reading takes as long as it takes.* Behind her, Soleil Vance stands at the back with three junior readers arranged around her like chess pieces, pale hair pulled tight enough to lift the corners of her eyes, immaculate grey gloves hiding whatever the forge did to her hands last spring. Mara walks home through streets she has known since childhood. Past her father's shuttered forge. Past the corner where she taught Finn to skip stones in the gutter. Past the flat where her mother died coughing up ash that would not read, would not speak, would not say what she had seen in her final fire. Finn is at the table with a book open in front of him, right hand missing two fingers to a coal-scattering accident, the stump healed badly. Then someone knocks, and Prince Ryven Ashvale is standing in the hallway. She knows him by the signet ring, by the white streak at his temple, and by the fact that men like him do not come to buildings like this one. *My brother believes it. He's been searching for it. And he's been using forbidden magic to do it.* *Forbidden magic.* *He's trying to resurrect a dead god. If he succeeds, the realm burns. Everyone you love burns.* What follows: a fever in the crown, a pact made during an ash-storm, a cavern of ember-root, a healer's price, a prison of ash and iron, a sister's gambit, and a betrayal at the market where her mother used to trade recipes. The cost is stated plainly by the end. She will have to break the one object her mother left her, knowing exactly what breaking it releases. He will have to tell her the thing he has been hiding behind every clever answer he has given her, which is that he is already dying, and was too much of a coward to say so.