Christa M.
Blake

Wren cuts curses out of the realm's worst men — eight silver a throat — and survives by staying unseen. Then a fae lord with drowned-green eyes and an impossible binding sits down at her bar, the cut goes wrong, and a thread of silver ties them pulse to pulse.

The crown is won, and the bond that won it is going cold. Something patient is moving against the new throne, and the only road to the truth runs south — back to the mother Wren left and a house of women who have kept the same secret, in writing, for four hundred years.

For fifty-eight years the order has prepared for this autumn, and Wren has stopped waiting for it to come to her. She rides to the end of the kept road, toward a thing older than the throne that has been waiting for her in particular.

Sorrel reads people the way other women read weather — one look and she knows exactly where a soul will break. The gift pays the rent on a back room and costs her the shake in her hands.

Years north of everything, she answers to a dead woman's name and reads ledgers instead of people — a held breath she has long mistaken for peace. Then the wrongness arrives on the morning packet.