Bound to the Fae King

Wren Aldercott is the hedgewitch of Halloway, a village of eleven houses at the edge of the Thornwood, and she has spent her whole life obeying its oldest rule: you see nothing, you say nothing, you live. She was born with the Sight - the rare gift of seeing through fae glamour - and she has kept it hidden for twenty years.

Then the Hollow Moon rises, the fae ride out of the Thornwood for the tithe, and the lot falls on her sister. So Wren walks onto the chalk, speaks her own name instead, and binds herself to the Hollow King of Ashfall for one year and a day: a ring of rowan and iron, a court of two hundred beautiful fae who would rather she had never come, and a seneschal, Rhiannon Sable, who has run this house for three hundred years and intends to go on running it.

The bargain looks simple. Serve the year. Keep her sister safe. Walk out free. But Wren is a hedgewitch, and hedgewitches do one thing better than anybody: they find what is hidden in a thing and say it out loud. And a great deal is hidden in Ashfall. A garden bed nobody will explain, planted on orders from inside the house. A wine that has been quietly sweetened for her benefit since the night she arrived. A book that belonged to a mortal hedgewitch, shelved uncatalogued among the garden ledgers. A stone bench with nine names carved into its underside - the nine women who stood where Wren now stands - and a tenth line, barely begun.

And there is the rot: a grey, patient appetite spreading down the north border, eating the Thornwood from the inside, held back for three hundred years by one man standing alone on the line once a week with his bare ruined hand. The king will not explain himself. The seneschal smiles and recites the terms. And under the walled garden lies a well the court will not go near, because the well is not a well. It is a gate, and what waits behind it has been fed for three centuries on bargains exactly like Wren's.

To save her village, Wren will have to read Ashfall the way she reads a sickroom, symptom by symptom, lie by lie, until the truth stands in the open where the rot cannot reach it. The answer, when she finds it, is not a bigger bargain. It is a knot tied in front of both worlds - freely given, without price, without threat - by a mortal woman who knows exactly what it will cost her, and says yes anyway.

Bound to the Fae King is a complete romantic fantasy of bargains and housekeeping, and of the difference between a chain and a knot: the story of a hedgewitch who stopped seeing nothing, started saying everything, and taught a court of three-hundred-year-old liars to do the same. Thirty chapters. Every secret told. No thread left hanging. And a heroine who would rather ask the next question than keep the old silence, whatever either world thinks of her for it.