A Song for Silent Strings

Three courts lit. One gone dark forever. Three brands on her hands, two on her heart she won't admit to - and a winter coming with no room left to keep a distance.Liora has saved the Wildwood and lost the Wickfen, and the losing has welded her into the one shape that frightens the people who love her: a woman who will pour herself out for the whole sky and refuse every hand that reaches to help her carry it. She has stopped lighting windows. Aurelian has stopped reaching through them - for reasons he still cannot tell her, the vision and the death-cost and now a fragile impossible hope he can't yet make real. They ride inward more in love and more apart than ever, each refusing the other to save the other, and the dark at the heart of the sky waits, patient and gentle, for the day she finally believes she's meant to burn alone.The road runs now to the Lyre - a walled winter court of music, its star dimming slow under the snow, its gates shut against a siege that has been grinding at it all season. To save it the company must get inside; and once inside, snowed in, besieged, packed into a court with no exits and a single hearth, Liora and Aurelian will find the one thing the whole road has been keeping from them: nowhere left to stand apart.There is one bed. There is one long winter. There is a court that survives by voicing what it needs - singing the unsayable, because the Lyre folk learned an age ago that a need kept silent is a need that kills you - and two people who have spent three books perfecting the art of saying nothing at all.Something has to break. After three books of slow burn, of offered hands refused, of windows lit and bricked shut - in the snowed-in dark of a besieged court of song, with nowhere to run and nothing left to hide behind, the thing between them finally does.The kiss the whole sky has been waiting for. And the secret that will make it cost everything.

Pages: 297, Paperback, Independently published