Bloodbound: The Dragonsworn Chronicles

Six months of Council meetings have produced sympathy, minutes, and a rider who keeps getting worse. The fix that saved Ashwing isn't holding for Elin Voss and Rimeglass, and Wren has run out of patience for an institution that keeps mistaking caution for a cure. When the answer turns out to be locked inside Chainbound medical record the Aerie has never been allowed to see, the Council says no - so Wren goes anyway, off the mountain and off the map anyone sanctioned, into Chainbound territory itself, the enemy she's never once had to look at up close. What her team finds in a Chainbound archive is worse than a cover-up: generations of clinical record proving the coercive rite's true cost has always been known and always been hidden, and a name buried decades deep that finally connects her parents' deaths to the very raid that broke Threnody, years before Wren was old enough to remember either of them. Then Lord-Sorcerer Vashtar Corim finds them first - and offers Wren exactly what she's spent this whole book begging her ownCouncil for. A real cure. Faster. Working. Hers to control this time, instead of his. All it costs is the one thing her parents refused to trade away on that same ledge, for the same reason, long before her. The archive gets out. Not everyone does. Not treasure. Not control. Just the harder, slower, honest thing - chosen again, on purpose, even after it's already cost her everything it's about to ask for next.