The Thornbound Crown

Seventeen-year-old Elowen Ashcroft drags a black-rooted thistle from the peat bogs surrounding the Ashwood Conservatory, then watches a second one sprout, unbidden, from her own clenched fist. The plants shouldn't exist, but the school needs scholarship bodies, and Elowen needs a place where no one remembers the name Mira. Beneath the ancient stone halls and their tangled thornwarden, someone is watching. When a student is found dead among the briars and a hooded figure begins stalking the dormitory corridors, Elowen and her brother Corin are drawn into a conspiracy that runs from the Examining Faculty down through the deepest layers of The Stacks, where Old Maren tends forgotten records and a revenue collector's ledgers hint at students who simply vanished. Magister Vorath presses her with questions about the thistle's growth. Warden Cressida watches her cross the courtyard. And Caelith Vorne, the thornwarden's heir, may know why the briars whisper her name. A crown lies buried beneath the Conservatory, rooted, waiting, fed by something older than the school itself. The question is whether Elowen will unearth it before it roots her, too.