The Longer Life

She has outlived everyone she's ever loved. Three hundred years of practice means she's very good at not loving anyone else.

Caelindra fought in the war that saved the world, raised a child who grew old and died peacefully in her arms, and has spent the two years since walking, carrying a sealed letter in her coat pocket that she hasn't been able to open. When the pass road dead-ends at a mountain village called Thornhallow, she tells herself she's just passing through. The village, it turns out, has other plans.

Thornhallow runs on hot springs that have quietly healed people for generations, a healer who's run out of hands, a bench that's been worn to fit the man who sits on it, and a thirteen-year-old apprentice with more raw magic than sense, who calls Cae by name like it costs nothing at all. The springs are weakening, and nobody can say why. Cae can. Teaching the girl to control her gift might be the only thing that can fix it, if Cae is willing to stay long enough to see it through.

She isn't. Except the winter is long, the work needs doing, and somehow there's always a second cup of tea waiting when she comes downstairs.

The Longer Life is a slow, warm cozy fantasy about hot springs, dry humor, an elderly goat's worth of opinions from the locals, and the particular courage it takes to love something you know you're going to outlive. For readers of Legends & Lattes, Nettle & Bone, and The House in the Cerulean Sea: a found-family story where the magic is small, the kindness is real, and nobody asks where you came from until you're ready to say.