The Flame King's Reluctant Bride

Port Carrow's harbour smells of salt and gunpowder and somebody's burnt sugar. Rosalind Darrow presses herself into the shadow of a stacked crate and counts the guards on the gangplank. Two, both in navy wool with silver lightning bolts stitched across the chest, both watching the crowd instead of the ship.

She has timed it for the grand finale. The Council always saves its best for last.

The ledger is in the captain's quarters, third drawer, behind a false bottom. She watched him lock it there three nights ago from the servant's passage with her palm flat against cold plaster. She paid a dockhand three silver marks to learn which door would be unlocked. The lock on the cabin takes her eleven seconds and a hairpin.

Inside the ledger, written three times in the margins and underlined: *Ascension Plan.*

Then the footsteps in the corridor, and the door, and a hand closing round her wrist like iron. Dashiell Marwick has storm-grey eyes and three pale duelling lines across the knuckles of his right hand, and Rosalind has seen that scar before, in the dark, on the night her parents died.

He knows more than he should. He knows her uncle has been trying to marry her off for a year, that her brother Bram wants the Navy, that she runs a small operation out of her father's old warehouse. He also knows the thing she has never told anyone: that she can tell when a person is lying.

*"I think we both want to know who killed our fathers."*

Unlicensed magic, an affinity that belongs to no House, is the kind of thing the Council answers with iron cells beneath the Elemental Tower. Dashiell offers a tea house on Silver Street at noon instead, and the offer is not really an offer.

What the ledger names is a plan financed through her own family's house, a temple, a date, and a requirement written down like a shopping list: one fire elemental, bloodline unbroken.

Her cousin Sabine butters toast with the precision of a surgeon and has already arranged for Bram's acceptance letter to arrive.

A closed-door romantasy of elemental houses and court politics, ending in a Council chamber where the woman who spent her life hiding what she was stands up and testifies.