The Thornbound Vow

Smoke curls from a pyre on the salt-stained Ravenmere pier, and Eleyna Vant watches her mother's body burn with a letter still clenched in the dead woman's fingers. The letter speaks of a vow , unrecorded, unpaid, and now due. Four years Eleyna spent as a blade-hand in service to Calden Throsst, and never once was she told what debt her mother truly carried. Now Calden himself has come to the funeral, Aldric Veyne's agents circle the mourning crowd, and a Wounded Stranger collapses at the harbor gates speaking fragments of an older name for the Nine Heirs. Each step Eleyna takes toward the truth drags her deeper into a tangle of inheritance, oath-breaking, and the silent war between the Crownless Knights and the Council Voice. The Marsh Witch's voice rises from the reeds with warnings she refuses to explain. Loom-Mistress Jessa trades a thread of truth for a price. Ghost-Sailors remember a vow the living have been allowed to forget. With every secret she pulls free, Eleyna risks the safety of her sister Mae, the silence of a Silver-Eyed Boy who should not exist, and the life of the captain she is no longer certain she can trust. The thornbound vow was sworn in her name. She will be the one to decide whether it breaks , or what it costs to keep.