In the north the sun has been gone for eight hundred years, and the immortal courts that rule the dark do not run on blood.
They run on years.
A season buys a healing. A decade opens a gate. Every mortal in the sunlit south knows the price list by heart, and someone has to draft the contract, count the clauses, and witness the ink.
Wren Halloran is the finest young bargain-scribe in Amberdown, which means she knows exactly how bad a bargain is before she signs one.
She signs anyway. Her sister is dying, the cure exists only beyond the Gloaming Line, and the Sunless Court has named its price: nine winters of Wren’s own life, paid in installments, in person, in the dark.
But when the court’s Reckoner looks at her to appraise what he is buying — the glance that tells a creditor what he holds — he cannot see her end.
Cassivan Ithane has kept nine starving courts out of war for two centuries by rationing time down to the hour. He has never found an error in his own ledger. Wren finds one in an afternoon, in front of his whole court, and he does the most dangerous thing a man in his position can do to a woman he owns.
He gives her a desk.
Because under the Concord of Thorns, a holder who takes his debtor to bed has coerced her. The bargain voids. Her paid years revert as debt. And he burns.
Nine winters. Twenty-two clauses. One law standing between them — and one impossible thing standing behind her: a power the founding document of the world swears cannot exist, and nine immortal courts who will go to war the hour they learn her name.
She has exactly one weapon against all of them.
She read the fine print.