The Briar Queen

The queen's last breath unbalances a kingdom balanced on a blade. Sera Vane has carried one dream her entire life , her mother's face pressed against a frost-rimed window, features bleeding like wet ink. What begins as private grief becomes something far more dangerous when Queen Morrighan falters and the dream starts spilling into waking: visions of briars, buried bones, and a veiled figure who knows Sera by name. A warning her mother may have died to deliver. At court, the kingdom holds its breath. The scarred nobleman Lucien Vyr circles the throne with quiet interest. Captain Davos guards a queen who no longer recognizes her own name. Maren Thornwood , a healer with secrets of her own , reads the omens and finds the Vane bloodline written into them. Isolde Vane, Sera's fierce and frightened sister, watches her family's buried past surface at the worst possible moment. And the realm's only heir is a child called Wren, who sees too much and speaks too little. Forced from shadow by Kael Ashworth's careful revelations, Sera must choose: bare her gift and become a weapon for the crumbling crown, or vanish into the briars and let the kingdom fall with her. But the Veiled Emissary has waited lifetimes for this fracture, and what Sera's mother truly was may rewrite the laws of the realm. The briars are waking. The crown waits. And the dream has only just begun.