Flesh and First Light

A bolted door, a week to the hearing, and the man she loves sealed in stone on the wrong side of it.Corvus made the oldest choice he knows: he took the loss himself. To stop Wren from chaining her own life to the tower, he engineered his own sealing - and now he's bolted inside the bell-chamber, conscious only in fragments of stone, while Wren is locked out with seven days until the hearing that could end everything.She's furious. She's gutted. And, somewhere on the wrong side of that door, she finally understands the thing that broke them: her instinct to fix-it-alone-and-flee and his to guard-and-sacrifice are the same wound wearing two faces. They have both spent their whole lives refusing to be saved.The recorded way out - Corvus surrendering the centuries the stone has kept - turns out to be a death sentence in disguise. The real answer is one neither of them could reach alone: the curse was written for a place, not a man, and a place has a whole town in it. But asking Aldervane to take up the watch means asking Corvus to do the hardest thing of his long life - let himself be saved.Mabel, Oswin, Théa, a town that has loved its stone watcher longer than it admits - all of it comes down to one sunrise, and one terrible risk.After three hundred years of dawns that took him, Corvus is finally going to find out what the morning feels like - if Wren and Aldervane can hold the line until the sun comes up.