Realm of Frost

The factory floor has become a furnace. The looms are skeletons of black iron, their threads burning like fuse lines, and in the middle of it something pulses that is not fire at all. *Two.* *Mama, please.* *Three.* Charlotte falls. The awning of the milliner's shop tears under her, her shoulder pops, and she lands on the pavement with the breath knocked white out of her. When she looks up, Elinor Ashwood is a silhouette in a window glowing like a furnace door, mouthing three words nobody will ever hear. Then the window explodes. Seventeen years later, Charlotte Ashwood stands at the edge of Emberhollow's Iron Quarter and watches the smoke come off the chimney stacks. Her mother's body was never found. The inquest called it an accident. Her father was arrested for debts that had not existed before that night, and the site was bought at auction six months later by Renford Gray's father. The sign over the door now reads Gray and Sons Textiles. In her satchel this morning: a forged manifest, three sealed letters, and a brass-and-copper device with a core of crystallized ash that she has spent six months building. Renford is waiting for her on the cobblestones, immaculate, wearing a silver ash-leaf brooch, to explain that her father's trial is in three weeks and the Ash Mines are a sentence rather than a punishment. He has an offer. *My price is your father's patents. The marriage is merely the legal framework.* The other man who wants what her father built is Julian Blackwood of the Smoke Court, who has a silver eye, a scar that pulls at his mouth, and her father's journal memorised line by line. He tells her a thing she does not want to hear: that the tinkerer she grew up with was an engineer who built something that could move an elemental core out of one person and into another, and that the date in the journal is the date of the fire that killed seventeen people and took half the industrial quarter. What follows is a ball where the guest list is a threat, a ledger behind a false panel, a sister named Eleanor who refuses to keep waiting in cellars, a man with two fingers missing who kept a uniform pin so he would never forgive himself, and a locket hidden behind a loose brick with a map inside drawn in Charlotte's mother's hand. Realm of Frost is a closed-door fantasy romance of courts, engineering and inherited fire, in which the heroine finally finds out what was burning in the middle of that factory floor, and what her mother died to keep out of the Crown's hands.