The Kindling Throne

In the Nine Reaches of Auveth, dragons are not ridden by the worthy. They are harvested from the dead.

Every person who dies holding an unbroken oath gives one last breath. That breath hardens into kindling. From kindling comes a dragon, carrying a shard of the dead soul and the promise they failed to keep. The Ashen Conclave owns the dying. The Korrin vault-lords cage the unborn. Crowns rise, marriages bind, and traitors burn because every oath in Auveth has teeth.

Sable Nhar was raised to sit beside death and collect what the powerful call theirs. She knows better than to love anything she cannot bury.

Then she saves a dying soldier by doing the impossible.

She wakes his dragon while he is still alive.

When a deathwarden's daughter exposes her forbidden power to wake dragons from the living, she must cross a war-torn realm to find the dragon born from her murdered mother's last promise before priest-bankers, vault-lords, and a beautiful spy turn her grief into the next imperial crown.

Now every faction in the Reaches wants the girl named in a forbidden prophecy: the Unkindled. Sable wants only one thing-the dragon born from her mother's final oath.

*I'll come back to you.*

Her guide is Kest Vask, a smiling spy with a knife in every truth. He has orders to deliver her alive.

And the longer he protects her, the more ruinous that order becomes.