She is what his oath demands he destroy. He is what her lies require her to become.
Only the spellmarked rise in the dominion of Vereth, the rare few whose veins chimed when the Starfall burned a century ago. The Gilded command tide and ember and thought, their sigils blazing like dawn across their skin. Those left silent by the Starfall are called Hollow, their lack of aura an offense so grave that the Argent Crown banished them beyond the boundary lights. A life without magic became a sentence without appeal, which is how Mira Thorn learned to live as a ghost and steal as if her next breath depended on it.
The gutters of Latchford teach a different kind of sorcery. Mira's father drilled her in the arts no sigil can grant: the tilt of a wrist before a lie, the tremor that precedes a strike, the poetry of footsteps on wet slate. Armed with a deck of bone-scribed lots and a tin chime, she counterfeits an Echo, one of the rare mind-listeners who can press their will to the seams of another's thoughts. In markets thick with incense and watchers, she sells prophecies and mirages to stay invisible.
When Mira drags Prince Kael Draven out from under a collapse of alchemic glass in the Rootglass Bazaar, she earns gratitude she cannot afford. To repay a public debt, the Crown binds her to the Revelward Trials, a spectacle where the Gilded display their might in collapsing towers, shifting mazes, and blade-bright duels. To survive, Mira must turn observation into weapon and deceit into shield while Kael, the kingdom's unyielding hunter of Hollows, shadows her every breath. If the Trials do not expose her, the ache that grows between them might, and if he learns the truth, the man sworn to cleanse Vereth of her kind will be the one to end her. Between a forged gift and a fatal vow, Mira must decide what to burn and what to save when the echo of enchantment finally answers her name.
