the Second-Youngest Princess: Book One of Valdreshe Trilogy: 1

Fen Caldur is the duchy's second-youngest princess - which mostly means she's the one nobody minds sending off with an impossible task and a rusty key.The east wing garden has been sealed for longer than anyone can remember, and nobody can say why. What Fen finds behind the gate is half an acre of overgrown secrets, a suspicious orange cat who refuses to leave, and a groundskeeper who's been quietly watching the garden's wrongness deepen for three years and telling no one.Oswin Pryce doesn't expect the princess to notice much beyond the mess. He's wrong. Fen notices everything - the warmth in a wall that shouldn't be warm, the plant that shouldn't exist, the careful way he answers questions without quite answering them. As the seasons turn and the garden slowly wakes, so does something quieter between them - the kind of thing that grows the way the valley's magic does: through patience, through attention, through the small decision, made again and again, to keep showing up.This is not a book in a hurry. It's a story about what happens when two people who have each stopped expecting to be truly seen are, slowly, seen anyway - and about a garden that isn't just growing back, but remembering.A gentle, character-driven cozy fantasy about noticing, tending, and the quiet courage it takes to offer someone the unedited version of yourself. For readers of T. Kingfisher and Sarah Beth Durst - a slow, quiet, deeply felt fantasy about gardens, patience, and the courage to be truly seen. Book One of the Valdreshe trilogy.