The Thread-bound Waltz

Thessaly Ashcroft, the cool-eyed Recaller of Bellharrow's most trusted necrotic conservatory, spends her days drawing memories from the dead and her nights cataloguing the city's swelling tide of unspoken grief. The Ashcrofts' livelihood-and Thessaly's license-hang on one brittle clause: because she is a daughter, the conservatory will pass to the next male blood heir unless she marries someone willing to bind his aura to the family line.

When Everett Crowle, her childhood friend and presumed-dead heir, strides through the conservatory doors with a flawless aura signature, society rejoices... but Thessaly's stomach turns to ice. Everything about him is perfect-too perfect. She can sense a counterfeit's echo in every smile.

Assigned to audit the Ashcrofts that same week is Miles Merrow, a radiant Crown attaché whose faith in the law is matched only by his fascination with Thessaly's razor wit. Meanwhile, Quentin Vexley, the city's most irascible mechanist, arrives to service the old resonance engines-only to discover hints of forbidden aura-forging buried in the vaults.

As rumors swirl, festival banners unfurl across Bellharrow for the upcoming Carnival of Returning Lights-an annual celebration when lanterns bearing the names of the departed drift skyward, and the boundary between living memory and dead echo thins. The carnival's chaotic magic becomes the perfect stage for a forged aura to fracture, a wrongly resurrected spirit to name a murderer, and three very different hearts to collide.

Between midnight consultations with the dead, clandestine rooftop investigations, and one perilous waltz beneath lantern-lit skies, Thessaly must decide whom she can trust, how far she will bend the law of death-and whether her own heart is worth risking in a city that never forgets its ghosts.