Home is where the sky remembers your name—and this one is heavy with omens. The award-winning fantasist behind The Moonshard Ledger returns with a brand-new tale set among the wind-carved towers of Everspire, where maps are inked in starlight and vows outlast mountains. Liora Fen never planned to climb the Spiral Steps again, not after the Guild rescinded her starcartographer's seal and her savings turned into a box of useless promissory slips. But when the Aureline Consortium begins circling her mother's Observatory of Glass like gulls after a storm, she tells her family she's coming home to negotiate, to protect what's theirs. She does not tell them the constellations that once murmured directions in her ear have gone silent, their music muted as if a hand had smothered the heavens.
Now that she is back, Liora refuses to sleep on a pallet beside her mother's crates of broken astrolabes or share her brother's cot above the Tidemarket. Fortunately, the newly appointed Celestial Warden of Everspire—an outsider with a room to spare in his watch-house—needs coin. Unfortunately, his tower is rife with star-echoes: pale, watchful remnants of constellations that chill the corridors and turn her breath to frost. Liora has never tolerated the cold shoulder, not from family, not from sky.
Orren Thale is absolutely and entirely fine. Truly. He did not come to Everspire to outrun the Night Parliament's inquiry into what happened under the Black Meridian. He just wanted clean air, quieter skies, fewer questions. When he agrees to let the sharp-eyed mapmaker live beneath his observatory dome, he does not know she speaks to the dark like it might answer, or that she would look like stubbornness carved into a smile. But as market-days turn to meteor showers, the lines between oath and choice blur, and the forces that linger in Orren's tower begin to take sides. The Crowned Ibex slips restless from its appointed stars. The broken astrolabe Vespera ticks to a rhythm only Liora can hear. When the Consortium's ledgers and the Parliament's edicts grind toward the Observatory of Glass, Liora and Orren must decide which vows they will keep, and which they will break, to mend a sky that has stopped speaking—and to discover whether a temporary roof can shelter something more permanent than either of them intended.
