She was the weapon they buried. He was the heir who dug her up.
"The roots remember what we choose to forget."
A young woman from the edge of a dead wasteland discovers she can do something nobody has done in two hundred years.
Lira Ashwood has survived her entire life on the border of the Ashlands -- the grey, silent scar where the Fifth Grove was destroyed two centuries ago. She's a hunter. A cook. A girl who hears things in the roots that nobody else can hear.
When a summons drags her to Solara's Academy, she manifests all five magical disciplines -- including the forbidden one that supposedly destroyed the Fifth Grove. Assigned to the heir of Solara as her mentor, Lira discovers two things: the world's most beautiful city was built on a genocide, and the man who was sent to manage her might be the only person dangerous enough to help her expose it.
But her power is changing her. Every time she uses it, the root patterns spreading across her skin grow deeper. And the woman trapped inside the dead tree at the heart of the Ashlands has been screaming for two hundred years -- waiting for someone who can finally hear her.
The first book in the Verdana series.
"If I kiss you, I won't be able to stop."
"Who asked you to stop?"
"The Blight is not an attack. It's a cry."
"Cooking is the only prayer I've ever understood."
"They're small people frightened of big things. Don't shrink for them."
"Your sheets are full of flowers."
"I don't care."
"Home. Not a place. The people in it."
The story of a world where everything is grown, not built -- and the people who discover what was buried beneath it.
The weapon they buried.
What sleeps beneath.
Coming Soon
Ice meets forge.
Coming Soon
What grows back.
Coming Soon