Crown of Fangs

Seventeen pence sit in a stack on the nightstand. Enough for stale bread and weak tea at the stall on Crispin Street, not enough for Dr. Marsh's bitterwort syrup. In the next room Catherine's sister Eloise is coughing the wet, tearing cough their mother made three winters ago, in the bed Eloise sleeps in now. Catherine pulls on her shawl to go beg the doctor for credit at first light, and stops. A black vine has grown across the inside of the front door overnight. The thorns are the colour of dried blood, and a scrap of parchment has been impaled on one of them. *To the Heir of Rosalind Lowell: The Ash Court calls its due.* The man waiting in the grey London dawn wears green velvet with a silver thorn pinned at his collar, and he already knows exactly what is wrong with her sister. *You can either honor it, or watch your sister die.* He is Edmund Wincroft, half-fae prince of a court where the king is dying, the seasons are turning wrong and the gates are collapsing. Catherine's mother was a Winter Court spy who defected, fell in love with the king of the Ash Court, and swore a blood oath binding her firstborn. Catherine is that oath. *The debt doesn't die, Catherine. It just waits.* She is given fifteen minutes to say goodbye to Eloise. What she carries into a court of immortals is the one skill she has. *I'm a seamstress,* she tells Edmund. *You learn to read people when you're fitting them for dresses.* By her first masque she has read Lady Margaret Vane, who intends to marry him, and the bruise under the powder on Margaret's cheek that says Margaret has been meeting somebody in secret. She has read Julian Ashford too, the scarred courtier who calls himself the king's shadow and his memory, and who says he has been studying this curse for three hundred years. Julian is the one who names the price out loud, because Edmund will not. The curse breaks only if Catherine stops being human, freely and by her own choice, while her sister goes on dying in a London tenement. *I vow to stand beside Edmund Wincroft, Ash Court prince, and break this curse, on my blood and my honor.* A fae-court romantasy that runs from a Crispin Street tenement to the Door of Thorns, with a dying king's bargain, a traitor working inside the walls, and a seamstress who finishes the book wearing a crown. Closed-door.