About this audiobook

The executioner's axe hits the ice and sticks. Katya Volkova is fourteen, standing in the front row of witnesses on the Frost Palace steps, and the sound is wrong: a clean, cold thunk that means her father's neck is still attached to his shoulders. General Irina Morozova holds up her left hand, where two fingers end in smooth scar tissue with a thin thread of charcoal running beneath the healed skin. *Your father gave me these.* She says it to Katya, not to the crowd. Her brother Pyotr is twelve, gripping her hand, still expecting their father to talk his way free. *The Heartstone is the oldest magic*, her father told her once, when she was small and he was teaching her the names of the stars. *It can heal anything. Even the ash curse.* She did not understand then. She understands in the processing hall, where a clerk opens her forearm for a blood test, writes negative in his ledger, and stamps both children into twelve-hour shifts in the textile mills until they turn eighteen, while the grey patch at Pyotr's temple spreads to his cheek overnight. By the time she is grown, Katya sits with her back to the door in a tavern called the Silver Coin, across from a man in a wolf-fur coat with a gold tooth who has a map of the Frost Court treasury and will not lay it on the table. Half now, half when she has the stone. The palace guards rotate on a schedule that changes twice a day. The wards are worse than the guards. Then Prince Darian Mordvin, pale blue eyes the colour of winter sky at dawn, hires her as a guide to show him the outer wards. Three days inside the palace. Three days closer to the Heartstone than she has ever been. He knew her name before she ever set foot in his throne room. General Morozova takes one look at her hands and the way she stands and tells the prince she is not a guide, she is a criminal, and then says something else quietly enough that he might not have heard it at all. A closed-door court romantasy of ash magic, frost runes and a relic that has to be stolen, for anyone who likes a thief with one thing left to lose.

Magic Dark Fantasy Royalty & Courts Curses & Fate Political Intrigue Epic Quest Family Royalty Romance Betrayal Rebellion Healing Journey