The Death-Made Prince

**Author:** Lisette Marshall

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** A condemned witch trades her deadliest secret for a chance at resurrection, only to discover that the man she bargained with and the man she mourns have both been keeping truths that will unravel everything she believed about love, loyalty, and her own power.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want their fantasy romance dark and complicated, who prefer their heroes scarred and morally ambiguous, and who believe that the most dangerous magic is the kind that makes you see yourself clearly for the first time.

Thraga has spent eight days in a prison cell in Svein's Creek, nine hours from the gallows, wearing a dead man's blood in a vial around her neck. She is not a hero. She is not a rebel. She is a woman who has spent her entire life making herself small enough to survive, and it has finally caught up with her. The blood belongs to Lark, the man she loved for four years, the man who died in her arms, the man she would do anything to bring back. Then the guards shove a stranger into her cell, and everything she thought she knew about herself begins to crack. The stranger is tall, sharp-angled, and still as a carrion crow. He has one eye and a face full of old pain. He is deathmade, a necromancer, one of the rare mages who can walk into the afterlife of Niflheim and drag a soul back through. He is also, though Thraga does not know it yet, a dead prince. Durlain Averre was murdered alongside his younger sister Cimmura by their own half-brothers. He came back. She is still imprisoned in the dungeons of King Lesceron Garnot, and Durlain cannot breach those wards without the one kind of magic he does not possess. Thraga has that magic. She has hidden it her entire life, because the world kills witches. Her mother was killed for it. Her foster father taught her in secret, then died. Lark, the man she loved, made her too frightened to use it. But in a condemned cell with nine hours left to live, she finally speaks the truth aloud. She is a runewitch. She snaps her own shackles with a trembling hand and a thorn rune. What follows is not a simple rescue story. It is a story about what happens when a woman who has spent her whole life being used finally stops allowing herself to be used. It is a story about the difference between protection and control, between love and captivity, between the stories we tell ourselves about the people we loved and the truth…