In the frozen kingdom of Asterfrost, magic is feared, witches are hunted, and the royal guard obeys the crown without question.
Elira Vale has spent her life hiding the ember-magic in her blood. In a land where winter never ends, even the smallest flame can be called treason. When a mysterious curse begins devouring villages beneath walls of living ice, Elira is captured by the king’s most loyal guard, Sir Caelen Thorne—a man sworn to deliver witches to the gallows.
But the kingdom’s survival depends on a secret buried beyond the northern mountains, where storms speak in old tongues and the dead remember forgotten vows. To reach it, Elira and Caelen must cross the haunted white wilderness together.
She is everything he has been taught to fear.
He is everything she has learned never to trust.
As frost closes around them and forbidden magic awakens, hatred gives way to reluctant respect, and respect to a dangerous tenderness neither of them can afford. For at the heart of Asterfrost lies a truth colder than the kingdom’s eternal winter: the curse was not born from witchcraft.
It was born from a broken royal promise.
And only a witch and a guard, bound by fire, steel, and an impossible choice, can end it.