They call it Solace, and they pour it with a smile.
In the gilded kingdom of Verdantia, grief is something you drink your way past. One warm, beloved cup at a time, and no one asks what the tea takes along with the sorrow.
No one but Gwendolyn Aldermoor.
She has the finest palate in the capital and a secret to match: for eight years, she has quietly steeped away her own will each morning, trading her sharpest edges for a comfortable marriage and a comfortable cage. Then she tastes the court’s new comfort blend and recognizes the flavor of her own life. Beneath the sweetness, something is being removed: the small, essential power to say no. The realm is being pacified one cup at a time, and she is the only soul alive who can taste it happening.
Following the poison into the city’s poorest quarter, she finds an ally in a dock merchant who would rather hang than pour a cup he has not named aloud, and a love built on the one thing her marriage never offered: honesty. But to unmake a mercy this gentle, Gwendolyn will have to become the very thing she is fighting, risk the one honest man she has left, and face how near the poisoner’s hand has been to her own table all along.
Some cups cannot be unpoured. And the most dangerous woman in the kingdom is the one who can still refuse.
A standalone adult dark fantasy of consent, coercion, and the terrible comfort of not having to choose, a gothic marriage thriller in cozy skin, a romantasy with teeth.
