Empire of Bone

Niamh Connelly sits in a glass-ceilinged solarium and watches the curse climb her brother's body. *"Cillian didn't flinch. He hadn't flinched in three days."* First the toes, then the ankles, then the calves. Now his fingers. When it reaches his jaw she will be holding a conversation with a statue. Her own court will not help her. They say the stoneling curse is a punishment and that Cillian must have earned it. So Niamh takes an unsigned silver mask from the reject shelf at the back of the armoury, picks a lock she has only ever watched her brother pick, and steals a vial of midnight oil. At midnight she opens the Veil and steps through it alone. On the other side, the Flame Court is holding its Masquerade. Finn Maguire is at a forge in that court, hammering out a replica of a key he copied in wax when nobody was looking. He was seven when his father rode out with the Emberheart's escort. What came back was a body in the Veil passage, a missing relic, and a verdict: the blame settled on the dead man because somebody had to carry it. Finn has spent twenty years trying to prove the story wrong. Niamh gives him a false name. He hears straight through it. *"Your accent. You're from Shadowkeep."* What they make is a trade, not a friendship. She can move through a festival full of guards the way smoke moves. He knows a cave with a rusted iron door that his father showed him when he was six, and a dying man's instruction about where to look. She gets the Emberheart and uses it on her brother. Then she gives it back, and Finn uses it to clear a dead man's name. Neither of them has planned for what is actually inside the cave, or for what the relic does when it touches skin, or for what their two bloodlines turn out to have in common. And Lord Ronan Kearney, who has spent twenty years hunting the Emberheart and who had Finn's father killed over it, is sending a retrieval team through the Veil on the same night. A fae romantasy of two courts, a petrifying curse, and a relic that was never where anybody thought it was. The romance is closed-door, and the last page opens a door rather than shutting one.