The Severed Vow

She wears her enemy’s craft on her own arm.

Cerian Hallow lost her left arm in the war and wears a replacement of the finest Iron Court craft. She enjoys the irony. She enjoys rather less that it makes her useful at Iron Conclave parties, where nobody looks twice at a woman wearing their own workmanship.

She’s there to map a trade. Bound objects — magic taken out of children and set into things that can be sold — moving through Iron Court houses with the paperwork of legitimate commerce. Cer is very good at getting people to talk. She was trained to it by a Court that threw her out.

Rennick Straed is an Iron Conclave heir who has been quietly investigating his own family for two years and has nowhere to take what he’s found. Neither of them can afford to trust the other. They do it anyway, and it costs them both.

Together they crack the commercial backbone of the trade — the ledgers, the routes, the houses.

And then they follow the profits, and the profits go somewhere the ledgers don’t explain. A great deal of money, for a great many years, vanishing into a place no Iron auditor can name.

Somebody has been buying.