The Cursed Ash Queen

Deveral Cade is a dealmaker, a man who has never given anything away in his life, and the last person on the continent a woman with nothing left to trade should be meeting at midnight. Morrow Zander presses her palm flat against her brother's forehead and counts the seconds until the heat tells her something she does not want to know. Rigel's skin burns through her glove. His breath comes in shallow rasps, each one a small battle lost. The wasting curse has painted his cheeks a bruised purple and the yellow in his eyes has deepened since morning, more yolk than white now. She has watched that colour shift across six months, tracking it the way sailors track a tide that only goes out. *You're not supposed to touch me. You'll catch it.* *I can't catch a curse, idiot. I'm your sister.* *Same blood.* *Same stubborn blood.* The room smells of camphor and something sour, the particular stink of a body eating itself from the inside. She has got used to it, which is the worst part. Then the letter arrives in handwriting that is elegant and precise and nothing like her father's frantic scrawl. *I understand your brother is ill. I have something that might help. Meet me at the Hall of Oaths at midnight. Come alone.* She reads it twice. Hope first, sharp and dangerous as a blade against the ribs. Then the dread, because that man does not give gifts. He makes deals, and she has nothing left. What follows: the price of a feather, smoke and honey on the tongue, a game of prick and hide, a burn he keeps covered, the shape of a truce, and a nightmare that will not open its hand. *Promise me you won't leave me alone.* *I promise.* *This oath binds you to a woman who will spend the rest of her life waiting for you to betray her.* *Yes.* She thinks about him at the bedside, in the hall, in the four seconds before every door she opens. She is not going to stop. Not when the oath is discharged, not when the crown changes hands, not ever.