the Shadow of Unmade King

The crown held. The crack didn't. And this time, nothing living is driving it. Eight months after the crown's pieces were forced apart to end a war, Wren Ashdown-Thorne has settled into the unglamorous work of guarding a fragile peace - border logistics, treaty schedules, and the quiet ache of watching Iselle Vance visit a grave she never talks about. Then the dead start rising on their own. No traitor commands them. No living hand drives them forward. The crack the last war left behind is widening by itself, and the only man with a plan to stop it wants to do the one thing everyone agrees would be catastrophic: force the two halves of the crown back together and hope. As Lord-Marshal Rane's certainty wins over a frightened council, Wren and Kaelen race to prove he's wrong before he gets the chance to be right about the wrong thing. And in the archives, Iselle finds a name for the thing she's been carrying since the day she buried the man she loved - and someone steady enough to sit beside her while she learns what it might cost her to finally let it go. THE SHADOW OF THE UNMADE KING is Book Three of THE SHATTERED CROWN, a romantasy of a war with no villain to blame, a rival too sincere to hate, and a grief that finally starts, carefully, to leave room for someone new.