Dissipate the Fog

She has three days to prepare, one man to persuade, and no idea why they chose her.

Aurie Gineron is twenty-three, a diplomat's daughter, and the Dominion's last option. Every senior official sent to Vincent Mercer has come back with nothing. So they send her north instead — alone, into four days of open sea and an island that lives under permanent fog.

She expects a cold negotiation with a difficult man. She finds a lord who reads during meetings and says exactly what he means, a household that tells the truth as a matter of routine, and a stone chamber beneath the estate that was built four hundred years ago to do something nobody alive can name.

She also finds that the ground answers her.

What Aurie carries — a warmth in her hands she has hidden since she was eleven — has a name on this island. It has a history, and a practice, and a word for what happens when it goes wrong. Somewhere in the records, eleven times, the builders left the same warning. Nobody has been able to translate it in two hundred years.

Two months to secure a donation. A capital that wants it fast and quiet. A man she was not supposed to fall in love with. And beneath all of it, in the fog, something older than the charter she was sent to defend.

Some fogs don't lift when you leave them.

Buildings That Answer — Book One.