Throne of Starlight
A Cursed Bloodline, Marriage of Alliance Fae RomantasyBy Vesper Hale
Length7h 13m
About this audiobook
The vines writhe away from her palm like startled snakes.
Rowena pulls back with a lacework of shallow cuts across her hand, blood welling in neat parallel lines. But where the thorns touched the faint thorn-shaped birthmark on her left wrist, they curled and blackened at the tips. She has never seen them do that for anyone.
Three nights ago, fae riders came through Thornwall village on horses made of smoke and ember, laughing like breaking glass. They took six people. Her brother Bram was the last, swinging a blacksmith's hammer at a fae lord's head until somebody put an arrow through his shoulder, and Rowena watched all of it from the root cellar.
Mira Greaves has survived sixty years on this border and lost a finger to a fae bargain. She tells Rowena what the birthmark means: the Thorn Curse answers to certain bloodlines, and hers is one of them. The same curse that is killing the crops. The same curse that put Old Man Harker in the ground with thorns growing out of his lungs.
*If I'm not back by dawn.*
*You won't be coming back at all.*
Rowena presses the birthmark to the wall, and the thorns tear themselves off her skin, and she steps through into furnace heat, black stone pillars, and a floor of crushed bone.
The man waiting on a horse of living ember is Dorian Flint, a thorn-hunter who tracks duskbloods across the Flame Court's border. His left hand is scarred and split, and something under the skin moves when the curse is close.
What Rowena offers is a bargain. What she gets is a contract sealed with her own blood, a brother in a cell three floors down, a slow poison already in her, and a deadline. *The poison is slow. You have three days to find the unraveling pattern.* She is a village scholar who reads botanical treatises and ledgers, and she has been handed a dead language.
Then there is Lord Croft, who led the raid, who traffics in people like her, and who wants something from her bloodline that no contract covers.
A fae romantasy of cursed bloodlines and forced bargains: a thorn wall, a hostage brother, a poisoned clock, an old text nobody alive can read, and a line in it about what the curse costs to end. The romance is closed-door.
Audiobook details
GenreRomance, Fantasy
Length7 hrs 13 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 15, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Dedication
2Chapter 1 - The Bargain I Made With Embers
3Chapter 2 - The Taste of Iron and Ash
4Chapter 3 - The Wound That Never Closes
5Chapter 4 - The Daughter of Thorns
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6Chapter 5 - The Nightmare That Woke Us
7Chapter 6 - The Contract Signed in Tears
8Chapter 7 - The Storm That Stole Our Walls
9Chapter 8 - The Gift That Bites
10Chapter 9 - The Portrait I Did Not Ask For
11Chapter 10 - The Thorn That Pierced Us Both
12Chapter 11 - The Blood That Remembers
13Chapter 12 - The Rival’s Whisper
14Chapter 13 - The Brother’s Knife
15Chapter 14 - The Cure in Her Veins
16Chapter 15 - The Heartstone’s Song
17Chapter 16 - The Fever That Laid Us Bare
18Chapter 17 - The Queen’s Gambit
19Chapter 18 - The Embrace Before the End
20Chapter 19 - The Thornwood Reborn
21Chapter 20 - The Choice That Cost the World
22Chapter 21 - The Embers of a New Crown
23Chapter 22 - The Court of Thorns and Flame
24The End
25About the Author
26Also by Vesper Hale
27Acknowledgements
28A Note from the Author
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