Ashes of the Crimson Throne

In the Ashen Court, silence is law and memory is treason. When young Brann the Apprentice draws a bar of impossible steel from the embers of the royal forge, the metal sings with a voice that should not exist, and the ground beneath the Crimson Throne begins to crack. Magistrate Vyrek dispatches the Ashen Court Riders, the Trial Judges, and the Three Swordsmen to contain the heresies the song has stirred: escaped prisoners whispering of an old kingdom, a cartographer smuggling maps to a buried pilgrimage route, and a strike team moving through the night to unmake the throne from within. Seraph Valdris, haunted by the echo of a mother who died for forbidden songs, and Mordan Valdris, whose memory the court has tried to burn from history, are pulled back into a conflict they thought they had escaped. A cloaked courier carries the last orders of a sleeping ember, a wound that will not heal threatens the apprentice at the heart of the conspiracy, and a captured prisoner holds the single secret that could redeem or annihilate every claimant to the throne. As the pilgrimage delegation marches toward the capital and the escaped prisoners close the last gate behind them, Brann must choose whether the iron he remembers is the key to the kingdom's rebirth, or the chisel that finally shatters the Crimson Throne. The hammer is in his hand. The choice is his.