A romantasy series
The Ashvane Court
A city built in tiers up a black cliff. A crown that binds two lives into one. And forty-one days before the dark takes them both.
The World
Ashvane is a realm of permanent dusk, ruled from Duskhaven: a capital cut into the face of a black cliff, climbing in tiers from the Lowmarket at the foot to the Spire at the summit.
Across the middle of the cliff runs the Veil, a band of standing twilight that the Shadow fae walk through as easily as air, and that no human crosses without an escort or a bought charm. It divides the city as completely as any wall. Above it, the Court. Below it, everyone else.
A hundred and twelve years ago, House Nightborne took the Spire from the dynasty that built it. The old line, House Vael, was believed extinguished, and the relic they forged has sat inert in the royal reliquary ever since.
The Hollow Crown
A seven-pointed circlet of dark iron, with an empty socket in the brow where a jewel should be and never was.
The Vael kings forged it as a safeguard. Worn, it binds a ruler and a chosen consort into one shared life: wound one and you wound both, kill one and you kill both. No assassin can take half of a bound pair. It was a clever answer to a bloody century.
It has not woken in a hundred and twelve years.
How Magic Works
Three rules, and the books hold to them.
- Shadow-stepping
- A Shadow fae can step between any two shadows they can both see. Not teleportation: they must see where they are going, and they cannot cross running water mid-step.
- Dream-walking
- Royal blood can enter a sleeper's mind. It is intimate, it is a violation, and it is the only magic in the realm that cannot be defended against.
- The bond
- What the Hollow Crown does. Two bodies, one life. The distance a bound pair can stand apart is not fixed, and it does not stay generous.
The Peoples of Ashvane
Every people in this world has one physical tell you notice within a line of meeting them.
- Shadow fae
- The Court. Three to four centuries long-lived, sharp-boned, a faint grey-violet undertone to the skin, eyes that catch light the way a cat's do. Weak to Vael iron, which dulls the working and burns on long contact. They lie badly, so Spire politics runs on omission rather than falsehood.
- Humans
- Short-lived, no magic, barred from the Veil without help. Most of the Lowmarket.
- Half-bloods
- Fae father, human mother, never the reverse. A century or so of life, and the fae shows in the eyes: they see in the dark. The Court calls them servants. The Lowmarket calls them witches.
- Dawn Court fae
- The foreign power across the border. Gold-toned, warm-blooded where the Shadow fae run cold, and their eyes have no shine at all; the absence is what you notice. They walk unseen in direct light, and they hear whether you believe what you are saying. Silver, not iron, is what hurts them.
- The dead god's clergy
- Not a people. Humans and half-bloods keeping a faith whose god has no name left. Their healing is real, it is slow, and it costs the healer a day of their own life for every serious wound.
- The Hollow Wood
- What lives beyond the wall. Shadow-hounds, blind, hunting by heartbeat, and the wood itself, which moves.
The Cast
As you meet them in Book One.
Wren
Thief · half-blood · LowmarketTwenty-four, raised in Fishgut Lane by a mother who died when she was nine. Fast, funny under pressure, and allergic to belonging to anybody. She wears her hair in a rope braid down her back, which is how you know she is not Court. The dark leans toward her when she is angry, and she has spent her life making sure nobody notices.
Severin Nightborne
The Shadow Prince · condemnedA hundred and forty years old and looks thirty. The second son, convicted of murdering his father on the word of the brother who took the throne. A year in a cell taught him to count things. He believes people are instruments and the throne is the only thing that matters, and he is wrong about exactly one of those.
Tam Ostrander
Human · ex-pit fighterWren's foster brother, roughly the size of a door, and the only person in the realm she cannot lie to. Says almost nothing during an argument and then one flat sentence at the end of it that settles the thing.
Solenne Marr
Cleric of a dead godEleven generations of women behind her, teaching each other the rites of a god nobody has named in two hundred years. Sunshine and stubbornness in equal measure. Every wound she closes costs her a day.
Corvin Ashe
Fence · bard · information brokerForty, and a half-blood who has spent thirty years pretending not to be one. He keeps his eyes lowered in lamplight, and does it in daylight too. He took the job that started all of this without asking enough questions, and he has not been able to put that down since.
Dain Rook
Former captain of the prince's guardThe only man who stayed. There is a brand on the back of his left hand where his rank used to be, and nobody has ever asked him about it.
H. Halloran
Sub-steward of the reliquary levelKeeps the lodging book of the royal reliquary in a careful hand. Wants no part of any of this. Gets a great deal of it anyway.
Marda
Fishmonger, Fishgut LaneForty-three, has sold fish since she was twelve, and has been the moral authority of that lane for about as long. Refuses to make anybody braver in the retelling than they were at the time.
Lucian Nightborne
King in AshvaneThe elder brother. Charming in a room and hollow out of one. He has never once been stupid, and he wants something from his brother that is not the throne.
Lady Ysolde
Envoy of the Dawn CourtShe has outlived three ambassadors and buried two of them personally. Her voice has been carrying across halls for eight hundred years. She is not anybody's enemy, which is exactly what makes her dangerous.
How to Say It
| Name | Say | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Ashvane | ASH-vayn | The realm |
| Duskhaven | DUSK-hay-ven | The capital |
| Severin | SEV-uh-rin | The Shadow Prince |
| Solenne | so-LEN | Sol, the cleric |
| Corvin | KOR-vin | The fence |
| Ysolde | ih-SOLD | The Dawn Court envoy |
| Lucian | LOO-see-an | The king |
| Vael | vayl | The fallen dynasty |
| Umbral Eclipse | UM-bral | The deadline |