A Mercy of Wounded Stars

Four stars lit. One gone dark forever. Four brands on her hands and the first gray in her hair. They are lovers at last - and they cannot agree about whether she is allowed to die.Liora and Aurelian have finally stopped resisting each other. It has not saved them. They both know the cost now - that the last star will take the whole of the one who lights it - and they have answered it in opposite silences: she has decided, in a place she shows no one, that she will pay it; he has decided that he will not allow it. A love that cannot agree about a death is a heavier thing to carry than a love that has ended, and they carry it inward, toward a court of menders whose every touch has begun to wound.The Healer's Court is the one House in the realm that was built to mend - and its healers are killing the people they touch, because a gift kept too long alone turns, in the end, to harm. To save it, the company must reach a healer who has walled herself away from every living soul rather than harm one more. And in her ruin Liora will see, too clearly, a mirror of her own road.But the Healer's Court is also the one place the order has ever claimed it could cure a Lanternbound - strip the light from the woman and leave someone ordinary, warm, alive, behind. Garran is no longer coming to cage her. He is coming to unmake her. And for one terrible breath, the man who loves her will feel the pull of it too.This is the book where the slow burn becomes a true rupture - two people who love each other and are both, irreconcilably, wrong. Where the voice at the heart of the dark stops lying and starts grieving, and she comes one breath from saying yes. And where a scholar with a book held open finally says the thing the story has kept from you since the first page - the truth about what she is, why the dark sounds like her own voice, and where the road she has chosen actually ends.It does not end in a hero's death.

Pagina's: 304, Paperback, Independently published