The Alchemists of Loom

Ari has already lost the people and the cause she loved. The resistance of the Five Guilds has been crushed by the Dragon King, and she now makes her living on the black market, where her talent for clockwork machinery earns her a living.

Cvareh wants the Dragon King's throne to go to his sister, and he believes the Alchemist Guild on Loom may hold the means to put her there. Wounded and alone, he crosses Ari's path. She sees an enemy she could kill and a profit she could make from it.

He has a different plan. Cvareh needs someone who can get him across Loom to the Alchemists, and Ari is the best guide he can find. To keep her from taking the easy kill, he offers her a wish for her greatest desire, granted if she delivers him to the Guild.

The book is a fantasy built on an uneasy partnership between two people who start as enemies, with a resistance defeated in the past and a throne contested in the present.