Pages of the Mind

Magic has slipped its bounds across the Twelve Kingdoms. Shapeshifters roam the land, portents appear, whole landscapes move from place to place, and strange allies who are not quite human walk alongside enemies ready to exploit the disorder.

Dafne Mailloux is a librarian, not an adventurer. The High Queen sends her out anyway, trusting her skill with languages and her knack for pulling the useful facts from a crumbling scroll. Just as valuable is the cunning she learned over thirty years under a tyrant, a skill she hoped never to need again.

On her mission, Dafne is captured by a barbarian king. He shares no language with her, yet he understands power, and he sees at once that his captive is worth something. She is made to marry him as part of an alliance, which leaves her a prisoner-queen in a court whose customs make no sense to her.

To save herself and her country, Dafne must learn to read the king himself. This is fantasy with a romantic thread, built on an enemies-to-allies dynamic and a heroine who relies on scholarship and wits rather than a sword. The pace turns on political maneuvering and the slow decoding of a stranger, and the story promises that his heart holds more secrets than she expects.