An Equinox of Blight & Bloom

A dryad librarian. A cursed wolf king. One marriage of convenience to regrow a dead tree before winter—or watch four kingdoms rot.

Princess Astrid Rylant has two talents: unearthing dangerous books and refusing to give up. The blood-curse killing her sister has only one cure—a Solstice Apple from a tree burned to ash. The last uncorrupted seeds are rumored to lie in the wolf king’s mountain vaults. Crossing the River Nox means walking into the court that hates her kind…and into the sights of the man who can help her or ruin her.

Cassius Navarro, Wolf King of the North, is losing his people to the Blight—and losing himself. Someone is opening his borders to daemonati, and the autumn equinox reveals his sharpest threat yet: a sunshine-bright scholar with tree-magic and secrets of her own. Astrid is the key to the cure…and to war unless he claims her first.

To save both realms, they strike a brutal bargain: a political marriage and three months to regrow the Solstice Tree. What follows is ice-road peril, knives in the dark, and a pack that might become a found family—if their enemies, and their pasts, don’t devour them first. As desire turns lethal-tender and magic wakes in Astrid’s bones, one promise becomes law in the North: Touch her and die.