An Oath of Frost and Forgetting

About this book

In Ilvanne every oath is held by a memory, and breaking one costs your warmth within minutes. Aeliss Corrigan cannot be sworn at all. To win back her mother’s lost memory, one man must die, and the only man who ever treated her as more than a file needs him alive.

An oath is only as strong as the memory behind it. In the Empire of Ilvanne, that is literally true—break it, lose your heat in eleven minutes.

Aeliss Corrigan drafts hedge-oath instruments in Kettlemarch for people too poor to afford an Attestry font. Her own memories don’t stick—whenever the empire takes one, it grows back. That makes her unsworn, a living hole in imperial law, and it makes her skin unsealed. When she hauls old Ceth Ambry from the river and Emeric Sarran grabs her bare arm, a foreign memory floods through her: a granite room, a woman’s hands, the weight of a newborn. It is the memory of her own birth—the one her mother surrendered to House Vandry and can never speak of.

Getting that memory back means dissolving the oath. An oath dissolves only when its carried memory is destroyed, and the memory dies when Ceth does. To free her mother, Aeliss would have to end him. But Emeric—Ceth’s gentle, guarded keeper, running cold at 33.1 degrees—is the only person who has ever handed Aeliss something instead of filing her away. She needs Ceth dead. Emeric needs him alive. And every touch between them costs.

A slow-burn fantasy of impossible touch and impossible choices—quiet, aching, and dangerous.

Perfect for fans of Robin Hobb and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Open the first page and step into the cold.