The Flame's Bargain

Three days until the treaty summit. Three days until Riona Kelynn is supposed to hand herself over to the Night Court like a sack of gold paid in blood. The marriage contract is signed, sealed by the regent's hand, and Lord Ennis will not unpick it. He is sixty-three, bald as a river stone, and he bounced her on his knee when she was small enough to fit in a bread basket. What he gives her instead is a letter: Night Court black wax, a crescent moon, and handwriting that leans left as though the letters are trying to get off the page. *I am well. They let me train with the garrison. The food is bland but there is enough of it.* It was written under supervision. They all are. But the spelling mistakes are Finnian's, which means her brother is alive, for exactly as long as she cooperates. She finds him in the training yard, seventeen and gangly and grinning, and he says the thing she came there not to hear: *You're going to marry a man you've never met and live in a palace where the sun never shines, and you're going to do it with a smile on your face so they don't have an excuse to cut my throat.* Lorcan Vane, heir to the Night Court, has already sent his bride a list of prohibitions. Flame symbols are forbidden in the palace. She burned the letter. When his sister Sorcha hears about it, she decides on the spot that she is going to like the woman. But Brynn O'Malley has been Riona's friend since childhood, and her smile has never once reached her eyes, and she has spent her whole life waiting for a chance to matter. And at the head table at Cinder Crossing sits a broad-shouldered lord, scarred across the cheek, missing the ring finger of his right hand, remarking pleasantly that eager young men make mistakes, that they charge when they should hold. A court fantasy romance of hostages, forged documents, a tapped-out rhythm worth filing away, and two wedding bands, one shadow-iron and one sunstone, forged to bind two magics into one. It ends in a hall of Solar obsidian and Night Court silverstone under a glass roof that lets in sun and starlight both; closed-door.