The Ghost Between Us

Ilse Brann is a seventh child, and in Carrow that makes her the crown's.

Every autumn the Tithe wagon carries the seventh-born up the mountain to the Reliquary, where the kingdom keeps its dead soldiers in boxes, and binds one into each child, so that no war ever has to end.

Ilse was counted out before she could walk. A bone-setter's daughter, small enough to weigh what a saddle weighs, who counts everything because nobody ever counted her past six.

Then the Keeper opens the eleventh casket, and the dead man inside is a prince of Vaskar, the enemy across the pass.

And his brother has come up the mountain to speak with him.

Aldric Vask has never lost a battle, never broken a vow, and never once asked for anything. Every one of his oaths is inked up his arm. Every night he sits across a table from a tithe-girl with his bare hand in hers, because it is the only way to hear his brother, and he does not look at her. He looks at the dead.

At least, that's what he tells himself.

The dead boy in Ilse's head is loud, funny, and lying to both of them. The Keeper has a word written next to Ilse's name, and it isn't fit. And the prince has sworn a vow about her that he cannot keep and cannot take back.

Everyone in the Reliquary learns the same lesson eventually: you do not keep the dead by holding on.

Nobody told the prince.

A slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers romantasy with a ghost in the room: the heroine bound to the dead, the enemy prince who needs her to reach him, and a fortress that counts its children. Dual POV. Book one of The Reliquary; the romance closes in this book.