After Hours

Xanthe reads a weave the way other people read a face. Her mother was the best of them at the loom before the Coil took her, and Xanthe has spent twelve years learning to read a pattern down to its oldest thread. So when the tribute-veil comes off her own loom carrying a mark she never set, and when her own name is called at the drawing from a lot she never entered, she understands two things at once. Someone in the Sun-temple wants her fed to the dark. And they are afraid of what she can read.

They expect her dragged screaming to the horned mouth of the labyrinth. Instead she walks in, because the oldest law of the maze is that only the freely given passes, and because she means to learn what truly became of every woman before her. The thing that pulls her back from the maze-mad in the dark is not the beast the priests describe. His name is Alcaeus, and the whole city has feared him longer than anyone alive can remember. He does not touch her. He asks. And the horned wrack that kill in the dark were never his doing at all. They were tributes, forty years of them, forced into the maze and left to rot into the very horror the city pays to keep away.

Everyone in the city loves the man who did it. The Oracle-King, the Radiant, who keeps the monster appeased and the city rich and drowned her mother for reading one thread too far. He wants her unmade for good this time, because she is the last soul alive who can read the true founding-weave and prove that his mercy has been murder since before she was born.

They think she is the girl they handed to the dark. They have not understood yet that the terrible thing they sent her to die for is the only one who never lied to her, and that she will climb into his court in front of the whole city and hang the true thread against his lie to keep him.

The Ninth Tribute is a standalone dark monster romantasy with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.