The Foxglove King (The Nightshade Crown #1)

by Hannah F. Whitten

men generally preferred you to be a set piece in the story they made up, rather than an active player.

She couldn’t miss either of them for long. People came and went; her only constants were her mothers—Val and Mari—and the streets of Dellaire she could never leave.

She should abandon him. She knew that. It was one of Val’s earliest lessons. If a job went south, it was every man for himself. But she couldn’t make herself run.

Death, for mortals, is inviolable: Any who would raise a body from the dead is guilty of the worst heresy and must be executed, so they may suffer forever in their own hell. —The Book of Mortal Law, Tract 1

There was something almost familiar about him, a sense that she’d met him before. But that was ludicrous. Lore didn’t know any of the Presque Mort, or any other members of the clergy, for that matter.