About this audiobook

A board groans overhead and Lenora stops breathing. The inn has been abandoned for three seasons, long enough for the roof to sag and the floorboards to warp, but the basement smells of lamp oil and sweat and something metallic she cannot name. Against the far wall stand twenty-three tearstone crates, stacked chest-high, each marked with the Sorrow Court's broken circle wrapped in thorns. She counts them twice. That is enough to arm every exile in Thornwood. Her mother wants specifics. Grade, quantity, destination. Queen Vashti does not send her only daughter into enemy territory for guesses. Lenora picks the lock on the nearest crate, three clicks, and finds black crystals the size of her thumb nested in grey wool, pulsing with a faint inner light. Then a silver wire snaps against her ankle and somewhere in the dark a bell starts ringing. She takes a tearstone anyway. She burns a wall of fire between herself and the doorway, smashes the boards off a high window with a broken table leg, and drops into the mud of the alley below. She does not get away clean. Behind her in the mist, a calm voice used to being obeyed says: *"Find her. I want to know why Vashti's daughter is spying on me."* Rourke Ashford. The exiled prince, born with a touch that drains magic out of another person, carrying a tearstone in his breast pocket that pulses like it is alive. He is holding her dropped glove, the one with the Flame Court phoenix embroidered on it and her mother's initials stitched into the cuff. Then a sealed letter reaches her, red wax still warm. Corbin's trial has been moved forward. He will face the pyre at sunrise. Corbin is her little brother. The one who wanted to be a scholar instead of a soldier, ink-stained fingers, a missing front tooth. He is in Vashti's dungeons, and that is the whole shape of the arrangement between mother and daughter: find the cache, deliver the coordinates, free Corbin. Which leaves Lenora with a stolen stone, a court that will call her a traitor, a brother on a countdown, and the one person who offers her help without asking her to swear anything for it. A fae court romantasy of two hostile courts, a spy who is also a hostage, and a fire that turns out not to be the one she inherited. The romance is closed-door.

Magic Royalty & Courts Political Intrigue Betrayal Rebellion Hidden Identity Enemies to Lovers Grief Family Healing Hero Dark Fantasy