The Bond Price

The Remnant needs war-drakes. The Reach has them. Neither side has ever successfully negotiated with the other - not because the terms couldn't be found, but because no one sent the right people.

Maren Solv has spent fifteen years making institutions legible to people they weren't designed for. She built the Tarved framework - the agreement that held when every previous attempt failed - by spending four months understanding what was there before she drafted a single clause. Now the Remnant is sending her to the Reach clan confederacy with eight weeks and an institutional mandate and the knowledge that three previous delegations were turned away in under two hours.

Davan Kael has turned away forty-one of the forty-three outside delegations she has assessed in six years. She is the Reach's best evaluator of whether an outside representative is operating in good faith - and she has rarely found one who is. When the briefing document on the Remnant's new representative contains a single detail that stops her, she does not know what to do with it. She goes to the contact site to find out.

What follows is twenty-eight days in the Reach's thermal uplands - an open plateau, a network of thermal corridors, a war-drake named Ash who does not perform her assessments, and a negotiation that builds something neither party specified in their mandate.

THE BOND PRICE is a clean, closed-door epic romantic fantasy set in the Ashveld secondary world with no magic. Power comes from bloodlines, ancient pacts, political architecture, and the sustained relationship between a people and their land. The romance is slow-burn and earns every page. The politics are precise. The drakes are real.

Standalone. No cliffhanger. A complete love story with a satisfying ending.

Can be read without having read The Treaty Bride. The world is shared; the love stories are their own.

Chronicles of the Broken Empires, Book Two.