Ashbearer
A merchant's pass bought her passage through Thorngate, but no forged vellum can hide what Kaelen Voss carries beneath her cloak , the ashes of a city she could not save, and a mission that may cost more than she can bear. In the Sable capital, Princess Cerys Marden waits within gilded walls ringed by the Iron Company's soldiers, while the executed dissident's body still hangs as warning against Lord Halric Vane's rule. Kaelen has one chance to slip past the steward's watch, reach the princess, and ignite the rebellion the Greenward correspondent has been too afraid to spark. But the turncoat in their midst has already begun his own negotiation with Vane's men, and Sevryn Marden's loyalties are splintering where the visiting lord's whispers can find them. Through taprooms where the one-armed harpist's songs grow too loud and a priestess tends to orphans whose parents learned what dissent costs, Kaelen moves toward a princess who may already be a prisoner in her own court. Every step inward carries her further from the cook who raised her, from the deserting baker's son she could not save, from the memory of a father and mother whose faces she dare not conjure. The Thorngate does not forget what passes through its iron. To bear these ashes is to accept that some fires must be carried before they can be lit , and some doors, once opened, will never close again.