Glimmer

Born with shiny green eyes. Destined for bad luck.

In famine-gnawed Latakia, that is the whole of Lesley's inheritance: a farm, a quick tongue, and a pair of eyes the neighbors call monstrous. Two centuries ago the goddess Freda sealed the demoness Chione beneath the earth and banned all mining; the realm calls it the Miner's Ban, and it taught everyone a habit sharper than any law - look away from whatever frightens you.

Then bandits halt a wedding convoy on the mountain road, and Lesley - hired maid in Lady Kebbel's bridal party - drinks a slow poison to seal a bargain she cannot refuse. One month to live, unless the bride's mysterious dowry is delivered. One month to become a lady at the point of a sword: wear Lady Kebbel's gowns, answer to her name, and wed Lord Roxanne of Hadrian - cold, brilliant, and far too observant - inside a castle the bandits intend to strip to its bones. Her job is to smile at dinner, survive the wedding, and point the way to the vaults.

It should have been a simple con. Instead it becomes alchemy and assassinations, shipwrecks and reading lessons, dragons in chains, and one inconvenient marriage that stops feeling like a lie. Lesley means to steal enough to buy her antidote and vanish. What she uncovers instead is a six-year secret swallowed whole behind Hadrian's walls, and the truth her kingdom has bled to forget: green eyes are not a curse. They are the glimmer - the last light of an old magic, and the only power that can see the thing now eating Latakia alive.

The thing has a name. The Rota: a machine in the dark heart of Nostra, an island empire shrouded in silver spiral clouds, drawing the elements out of the earth so its neighbors' fields come up thinner every year. It feeds an emperor whom the grave has never managed to claim, an emperor who sets tables for his enemies and eats the guests. His terms are simple: return what was stolen from him, hand over a Greeneye, or he opens the Rota to its full mouth and drains the whole country within three years. And war is coming with him.

A king too careful to act. A realm that outlawed the only people who could save it. And a farmgirl with a borrowed name and a month to live, crossing the Zarel Pass into enemy country at the head of a company of thieves and mercenaries - with her husband, a brother-in-law hiding something impossible, and an old green mother dragon who has been waiting all her long life for someone to unchain her.

Glimmer is a story of masks and bargains - of disguises, robberies, kidnappings, assassinations and shipwrecks - and of what happens when a girl the world called unlucky finds that the lie she told was the truest thing in the kingdom. To be seen is dangerous. To be seen clearly might save them all.