Kathryn T. Featherstone conjures a lush and disquieting fantasy of silk, secrets, and hungry miracles. In the wind-battered harbor city of Dentrelle, every child is warned never to stray into the glimmer-fog along Marigold Quay, where the gulls go quiet and gullies shine like threads. Isola Peregrine, a stage illusionist with a brass thimble charm and a pocketful of moth-ash, learned that lesson too late when her mother vanished there, leaving only a skein of pale filament snagged around a lamppost on Tarragon Street and a whispered name: the Gossamer Gate.
Years later, a storm tears the roofs from the dyehouses and unseams the ground beneath the Arachneum Theater, exposing a vaulted arch woven from something not-quite silk, not-quite bone. The Gate opens only in the corner of the eye and closes on screams. Baroness Elodie Voisard hires Isola to brave it and retrieve her heir, Lucien, who stepped through during a masquerade and did not return; she presses a silver needle into Isola's palm and offers a fortune that feels too heavy to be clean. Esmond Sallow, a quiet scholar from the Sunken Seminary, insists on accompanying her with a leather satchel of hex-twines and a book sewn shut. Dentrelle begins to change: window boxes erupt with glassy creepers that drink dew the color of old blood, orchards fray into lace, and people wake with spider-fine filaments braided through their veins, humming names that aren't theirs.
Within the Gate lies a night-country stitched from memory—gardens that bloom with unspoken promises, a river of ribbon snagged with wedding rings, a lighthouse made of pinned butterflies—and the truth that the Baroness's heir was not the only offering. Someone in Dentrelle has been feeding the portal for years, trading bodies for favors, and the Gate has learned to hunger all on its own. If Isola can read the weave of the city—its knots of debt, its loops of love, its loose ends of grief—she might rethread what was torn. But the loom on Blacksalt Firth is missing a single, bright strand: the one tied to the night her mother disappeared. To unknot the murders strangling Dentrelle and quiet the blooming horror that is making gardens of people, Isola must choose whether to close the Gate forever or step fully into it and let it finish weaving her into its pattern.
