Smokeless Fire

Sabra Kadir reads the old binding-script the way other people read a face. Her grandmother kept the true compacts before she was born, and her father copied the old covenants until the fire took him, or so the good Kindler says. So when the wells run bitter and the city sends her into the burned ward to unmake the devil it has feared for a thousand years, she already knows the thing they worship is a lie. She does not yet know the thing in the ash will be the one to prove it.

They call him the Cinderlord, and the city has blamed him for the burning of the Ninth Ward for longer than anyone alive can remember. He does not burn her. He asks. He offers her a door that is never locked and a truth no one else has ever told her: the fire grants only what is freely given, and a wish taken by force does not bless but curses. Every miracle the Kindler ever worked has bred the very droughts and fevers he then heals. He would know. He has watched it rot the fire for forty years.

Everyone in Sarab loves the man who did it. The Kindler who feeds the poor and blesses the wells and keeps the sacred hearth, and who murdered her grandmother with his own hands to steal the office. He wants Sabra unmade for good this time, because she is the last soul alive who can read the true founding compact and prove that his mercy has been murder for forty years.

They think she is the girl they handed the lamp. They have not understood yet that the terrible thing they sent her to destroy is the only one who never lied to her, and that she would climb the hearth-stair in front of the whole city and read the true fire against his lie to keep him.

Smokeless Fire is a standalone dark fantasy romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.