THE ETERNAL COURT

Eighty-eight chairs. Eighty-eight wounds. One accountant who counts everything.

Olivia Faren has never been anywhere. An orphan of no particular importance, levied to the Imperial Counting House at six, she is pulled off the Floor by a dying Foreign Minister and carried over the mountains to Kormor Kirak, the one city on earth where the rule of the heart is law, to schedule a theater. A peace is to be made in it. Two children are to be married in it. It has no roof.

In a valley where the Queen has reigned three hundred years, where the dead lie out under the sky and every door is painted against what walks at night, Olivia counts: the wounds on a murdered man, the posts of a ring, the coins in a satchel, the days to the wedding. The sums are simple. What they add up to is not.

Beside her stand a stable-hand with four scars across his back, an innkeeper who has kept her house a very long time, a Terrassian spy with a clockwork arm, and a princess who has never seen the ocean. Against her stands the kindest man she has ever known.

A gothic thriller of ledgers and blood.

An adult gothic thriller. It contains violence and blood.