A Throne of Bees and Iron

Her mother is minting law from inside the Veil. Her first instrument abdicates a king who never spoke. Isolde Marlowe rewrote the tithe in her own blood and tore the Veil doing it. Now she is the Notary of Crossings, the office she founded to give the grief of two worlds a procedure — and the jar on her shelf holds her husband's voice, complete and ringing true, speaking a renunciation Kaelan Ashvane never made. It was coined inside the Veil by the Witness: Sol's mother, enthroned among the Kept, spending the truths the living world renders. In A Throne of Bees and Iron, every court in two worlds convenes a Grand Assize to rule on Veil-minted instruments — and appoints Sol its clerk. She must build the law that judges her own mother. Across the border, Regent Vess has stopped hunting Verbatims quietly. Her Register Act is law, her new Iron Ink burns a lie-reader's hearing for a day with every signature, and she is drafting the document she intends no Verbatim alive to audit. But the Regent's own reader — Petra Vane, sixteen years old — has heard the folio lie, and is keeping a second, secret register: forty-one of the Regent's lies, in a careful hand. And through the seams of the sealed tear, the Witness's bees are crossing, each carrying one spoken word in its sting, in the voice of the one who spoke it. A Throne of Bees and Iron is Book Three of The Ashen Courts — court intrigue at a court of three laws, law as warfare, a mother and daughter on opposite sides of a torn Veil, and an established royal couple ruling together under siege. Book Three of The Ashen Courts. New to the series? Start with Book One, A Bargain of Ash and Ivy. AI Disclosure: The text and cover of this book were generated with artificial intelligence, edited and reviewed by the author, who takes responsibility for the final work.