The Shattered King

**Author:** Charlie N. Holmberg

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The cost of healing what has been deliberately broken, the weight of secrets carried in blood and bone, and the terrifying moment when love becomes both wound and remedy.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want a fantasy novel where the magic is intimate and costly, where the romance is earned through suffering rather than stolen glances, and where the war outside the castle walls is only half the battle.

Nym Tallowax is not the kind of woman who belongs in a castle. She is a craftlock healer from Fount, a village small enough that everyone knows her name and most people know her business. She keeps bees, mends broken bones, and holds her family together with the same stubbornness that keeps a damaged hive alive through winter. She has no interest in queens or princes or the politics of kingdoms she has only heard about in passing. She wants to be left alone to do her work, raise her siblings, and keep the past buried where it belongs. The past, however, has never been particularly good at staying buried. When the summons arrives from Rove Castle, it comes on the same day her brother Brien marches off to war. The queen of Cansere demands every craftlock healer in the kingdom attempt to cure her son, Prince Renn, who has been ill since infancy. Nym knows she should refuse. She knows the royal court will chew her up and spit her out. She knows that the last thing she needs is to be trapped in a gilded cage with people who will never see her as anything more than a servant with a useful trick. But refusal is not an option, not when the queen's displeasure could fall on her entire family. So Nym packs her bag, kisses her siblings goodbye, and sets off for the capital with a plan: fail the test, go home, and never think about Rove Castle again. The plan does not survive her first meeting with Prince Renn. What she finds in his lumis, the magical inner space that represents a person's health, is unlike anything she has ever encountered. It looks like a chandelier that fell from a great height and shattered into millions of pieces. The damage is so extensive, so precise, so deliberate, that she cannot believe it is natural. And when she mends a single tiny fragment out of pity, something impossible happens. The prince, who has not felt his toes in years, gasps. He can feel again. The queen does not let her leave after that. What follows is a story about captivity and the strange…