PROLOGUE
340 Words
Twelve Years Before The Story Begins — The Night of the Fever
Open on MARA CAELAN, 34, sitting at the bedside of her ten-year-old daughter in a rented room in a border-city that belongs to neither court. The girl is dying. The fever has a name in the old books — the Hollowing — and it only touches one bloodline. The child has been burning for nine days.
Mara has tried every mortal healer in three cities. She has spent everything. She has one thing left: a contact. A name passed to her by her own dying mother. If the magic is real — if the bloodline is what the old books say — then the princes of Winter can slow the Hollowing. But they do not do it for gratitude.
KAEL arrives. He is eighteen, already precise, already carrying the weight of an entire dying court. He does not pretend warmth he does not have. He examines the child, reads the fever's signature in her blood, and tells Mara the truth: without Winter magic sustaining her, the girl has until morning.
He names his price. A blood contract — the girl's hand in marriage, to be claimed when she reaches adulthood. In exchange, his magic will hold the Hollowing back indefinitely. She will live. She will grow up. She will never know about the contract until he comes to collect it.
Mara asks: "Will she be safe?"
Kael is quiet for a moment. Then: "She will be alive."
It is not the same answer. Mara knows this. She signs anyway.
The fever breaks by dawn. The girl sleeps. Kael leaves without looking back.
Close on Mara, watching her daughter breathe, the contract already beginning to fade from her skin as it embeds itself deeper — into her blood, into her bones, into the irreversible record of what parents do when they have run out of anything else.
"Her name is Sloane," Mara whispers, to the room, to the magic, to whatever is listening. "Remember that she has a name."
- Writer
