The Frozen Ember King

A woman runs through the Thornwood with a three-day-old daughter pressed to her chest, and the fae lord who fathered the child is already standing in the clearing. He does not kill her outright. He takes the baby, sets his palm over her heart, and freezes it. *"You made a bargain," he said, "and I'm keeping it."* That is a hundred years before this story. What it leaves behind is a rule. *Don't trust the fae. Don't love them. Don't give them anything they can take.* Morwenna Greymist is about to break all three. Her half-brother Finnian has three weeks, maybe fewer. He has stopped eating. His sleep is down to four hours a night. The frost has reached his elbows, he coughs ice shards into his blankets, and the hedge healer says that if it reaches his heart there is nothing to be done. Morwenna takes it to the council: twelve fae in frost-woven robes, a mother on a thornwood throne, and Lysandra at the edge of the ring with her hand on a silver thorn locket that used to belong to Morwenna's father, waiting to say *half-blood* out loud. High Lady Elowen is unmoved. *"I have been generous with my affection. But I will not bankrupt the realm for sentiment."* So Morwenna offers to go herself. The Ember Court has a healer who has broken frost-curse before, and High Lord Corvus has already named his terms: marriage to his son, a treaty, and the healer's services, in exchange for her bloodline on the throne of Thornwood. The son is Theron Wilder. Cold amber eyes, one hand missing its smallest finger, and a phoenix branded into his palm with three tears. *"I believe we have an arrangement to discuss."* He is not what the histories said. His father is considerably worse than them — a lord who has killed every relative who might one day have challenged him, leaving exactly one other heir, a girl of eight. And what is killing Finnian is not an illness. It is locked to something, and once Theron works out what, the way to unlock it comes down to a knife, a brand, a council chamber, and a decent chance of killing him. This is a fae court romantasy about a marriage negotiated over a dying boy, an heir who would rather be nobody, and the difference between a bargain and a promise. The romance is closed-door.