Trial of the Cinder Scion

Her fire comes out cold. In the Dominion of Solas, that is a crime punishable by death.

Eighteen-year-old Vesper Corvus has one rule in the Kiln: keep your head down and keep the forge lit. Solar-Light belongs to the highborn, and so do the armored drakes it commands. Commoners are meant to work, pay the Sovereign's tithe and stay out of the way.

Then the imperial collectors kick in her door and put a blade to her little sister's throat.

What pours out of Vesper's hands is not fire. It is Void-Flame: violet-black, cold as a grave, and extinct for two hundred years. The sentence is public execution.

Instead, the Grand Marshal offers a bargain. Enter Sunspire Academy's Crucible Trials, survive four brutal rounds against a field of highborn cadets, and finish in the top twelve. Win, and Kesta goes free. Lose, and Vesper burns.

Her assigned partner is Valen Cross: cold, lethal, the Grand Marshal's own nephew, and under orders to report anything strange about her to the Grand Inquisitor.

Vesper has plenty that is strange. A black drake that answers only to her. A power that grows each time she hides it. And a partner who keeps lying to the Inquisition with a mouth full of blood.

Every trial brings her closer to the top twelve, and to the secret the Dominion has buried under its own academy.

Trial of the Cinder Scion is the first book in The Dawnbound Crucible, a four-book dark fantasy romance of forbidden magic, drake bonds and enemies who learn to trust each other.