The Ninth Tribute

Every autumn Thariss lines the cliff road to watch a woman fight her way to the horned mouth of the Coil, then goes home satisfied that the dark has been fed. Xanthe knows what the tribute-veil looked like on her own loom before it came back carrying a mark she never set. She knows her name came out of a drawing she never entered.

So she does not fight. She walks in on her own feet, which turns out to be the only thing anyone has done right down there in forty years. The Coil is not a pit. It is a house, beautifully made, and something has been living in it alone for a very long time.

The city calls him the Bull of Thariss and pays a great deal every autumn not to think about him. Alcaeus has never taken a tribute in his life. He has only watched them arrive with their hands bound and go mad in his corridors, because the maze keeps what is freely given and poisons what is forced. The horned wrack that come out of the dark to kill are not his kin. They are the women, and they are all still down there.

Xanthe is a weaver, and any keeper’s-knot in a founding-weave can be checked by any weaver alive. That is an inconvenient fact for a man whose charter is a forgery, and for a Radiant king who has spent his whole life being loved. At the Feast of the Ninth she means to hang the true weave beside his and let Thariss read them both.

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