A Independently Published A Lesson in Embers Paperback

The brightest of us burn. Wren came to put out the fire.

In the gold city of Lumenne, holiness has a price-and the poor have always paid it.

The most gifted are gilded, their skin turning to living gold as the grace pours through them, and every midwinter the brightest of them climbs the Saint's Pyre and burns, gladly, to hold back the killing dark at the edge of the world. It is the highest honor the empire can give.

Wren Ashe knows it is something else entirely.

Hauled up from the fuel-vaults as a washout nobody, Wren hides a forbidden gift: she can run the holy magic backward, peel the gold from a dying child-and pay for it in silver frost that climbs, a little further each time, toward her own heart. She is supposed to stay small, and dim, and alive.

Then she collides with Lucan Aster: the Ascendant, the most gilded saint of the age, the beautiful doomed boy the whole city is preparing to set alight. And Wren realizes she may be the one thing in the world that can save him.

But every truth she uncovers brings her closer to the secret the gold city burns its children to keep-and saving the boy she's falling for could cost her the last heart she has left.

To end the burning, two people who would each rather die than watch the other pay must learn the hardest lesson of all: how to let each other bleed.

A Lesson in Embers is the first book in The Gilded Saints-a dark, slow-burning, high-heat romantasy for readers who love deadly academies, forbidden magic with a brutal cost, and a love story that could topple an empire.

- Deadly magic academy - enemies on opposite sides of a lethal system- Slow burn to high heat - a doomed chosen one who decides not to be- Found family, devastating sacrifice, and a hard-won, costed happily-ever-after