An Arrow of Wild Light

Two courts down. Two brands on her hands. Two secrets riding between her and the man she loves. And ahead, for the first time, a star that may not be hers to save.Liora has woken two dying stars now, and each one has taken more of her than the last - a cost she hides from the people who love her, the same way she hides the gentle voice at the heart of the dark that has begun to call itself by name. Aurelian hides a thing of his own: a vision of how this road ends, and the truth, read off a stolen shard, that the last light in the sky can only be lit by the one who pays for it with everything. They ride inward together, in love, each keeping a silence that would break the other - and each calling the silence mercy.The road now runs into the Wildwood, where the Archer's star has not dimmed politely like the others. It has gone wild - slipped its keepers, thrown off its rites, turned feral over a green court that has no idea how to hold a light that answers to no single hand. To save it, Liora will have to learn the one thing the Tallow Ward never taught her: how to trust the unlike, how to put her fate in hands that are nothing like her own.But deeper in the green, in a drowned hollow the marsh-folk won't go near, waits the thing that changes everything. The Wickfen. A place where a star went out two winters past - and where a keeper with the old gift went down to wake it, and gave it everything she had, and the dark drank her whole and stayed dark.A star that will not be lit. A sacrifice that buys nothing. Until now, Liora has believed the arithmetic always works - that whatever a light costs, she can pay it, and the light will take. The Wildwood is where she learns that the dark does not always bargain.Sometimes it only eats.

Pages: 297, Paperback, Independently published