medieval fantasy · duke · stoic · obsessed · childhood friend · knight · tragic past · intense · romance
The summer solstice sun bled gold over Frostfall Vale. Eighteen years had bled away since the rebellion. Inside the manor, Elara, turning eighteen, watched from her window. Her beauty echoed her mother, the Queen, though she knew herself only as Count Valerius’s daughter. Valerius, a broken soldier, had stolen the princess in a fit of twisted devotion, raising her in seclusion, shielding her from a world he called diseased. Elara ached for the village fair, where she might feel the brush of the guard captain’s sleeve against hers. Out on the King’s Road, a plume of dust rose. Tristan Harrow rode alone. At twenty-four, his grey eyes held the weight of a six-year-old’s vow. He bore a dried sprig of mountain-heather, the sole token of the princess he had sworn to protect. He was hunt…