The Ashbound Crown

Smoke stung her eyes before the heat found her skin, and by morning Wren Calloway's little brother was dead, and whispering someone else's name. When the Council of Crowns rides into her village with chains of cold iron and questions of blood, Wren learns the ash in her lungs was never an accident: she carries the inheritance of the Ashbound, a relic-lineage the reigning sorcerers have spent a generation trying to bury. The mark on her collarbone brands her the next vessel of a sleeping crown, and a dead brother whose journals she has never read is the only one who knew how to wake it safely. Forced to flee with a mute archer whose silence hides an old name, a soldier wearing a face that does not belong to him, and a child-proctor who may already belong to the enemy, Wren is hunted by Doyen Halren's scrying glass and stalked by something older than the Council itself, the Ashbound, who remember what she is and what she owes them. As Proctor Veld offers a throne in exchange for her surrender and Cassian Duhr circles her with promises dressed as loyalty, Wren must read her dead brother's pages, trust the man who once wore her family's face, and decide whether to don a crown that will remake her into a weapon, or burn it with the only fire she has ever known: the kind that warms, and does not consume.