A Kingdom in Her Bones

When the Crown Prism shattered above her burning kingdom, Princess Vesper survived with a gift no one else possessed: death magic. Now, seven years later, every soul in Solara is trapped inside a colored fragment, slowly deteriorating. Only necromancy can save them-but the cost demands a vessel, a body strong enough to hold an entire kingdom's worth of the dead. Vesper finds her answer in Aurora Veyne, a stranger four hundred miles away who has been haunted by other people's memories since childhood. Aurora's body becomes the map of Solara, and with each battle Vesper fights to claim the seven fragments scattered across the continent, she binds more souls into her unwilling vessel. The commanders who hold the fragments are turning on each other-and they are not the only hunters closing in. But Archmagister Cael Dunmore, the tutor who destroyed everything, is still alive. He is waiting for Vesper to become someone willing to wield a blade that can cut souls clean from living flesh. And as Aurora begins to resist, as the trapped dead wake and remember who they were, Vesper discovers that her power to save her kingdom may be the very thing destroying it. In a world where the dead were never meant to return whole, where love itself is a trap, and where the only way forward means leaving everything behind, Vesper must choose between the girl she was and the person she must become. But some choices can never be undone.