About this audiobook

A child's scream cut through the morning ash-fall. Rosamund Grey's knife paused over the whittled bone splint. She counted the interval between cry and cry — three seconds, then five, then two. *She's not done yet*, she said to nobody. She set the knife down, wiped her hands on her apron and crossed to the window. Ash drifted past the oiled parchment like dirty snow. The village square was empty. Even the goats had been brought inside. Commander Hooke's men ride in patterns she has learned to read. Two at the gate, one circling the mill, the rest fanned into a crescent that leaves no path to the woods. She watched them do this three years ago, when they took the blacksmith's son. He tried to run. They caught him at the river and brought him back with a broken collarbone, and the village paid for his healing in grain it could not spare. Pippin is twelve and her apprentice and his hands shake enough to slosh the boiled water over the rim of the bowl. Gideon is what rides in behind Hooke's men, and Gideon holds the bargain that Sister Margaux made over Rosamund's mother's bed on the night she was born, with a bone vial in her hand and the midwife's blood still wet on the linen. What follows: a knife that set the bone, a bone king's bargain, the weeping lady of a drowned village, a memory held in ash, a library trap, an execution that does not take, a confidante's poison, and an assassin who comes through the ash-fall dressed as a friend. *Sister Margaux has served this court for fifty years. She has never lied.* *A fool who loves you.* Dark fantasy romance with a village healer bound by a prophecy made at her own birth, a king everybody calls the Bone King, a standing garrison that takes what it wants, explicit scenes, and an ending that costs both of them something permanent.

Curses & Fate Magic Dark Fantasy Royalty Romance Hero Political Intrigue Betrayal Family Redemption Rebellion Survival Prophecy Identity