The Maid in the Usurper's Kitchen

Synopsis

Ten years ago the warlord Aldric butchered my family at their own supper table and took the iron crown off my father's dead brow. The court called it a cleansing. I was fourteen, and I lived because I learned to be no one, a girl behind a serving-hatch who made no sound. Now I scrub his pots. I am the lost heir of the Sevrane line, hiding in plain sight in the usurper's own kitchen, with the mark of a dead dynasty fading over my heart and a single purpose where a self used to be. I came to pull this rotten court down to the roots. I did not come to be seen. I did not come to save the people I am supposed to hate, and I keep doing it anyway. And I most certainly did not come to fall for the kind-eyed man who wanders down to my hearth at night to be no one too, the man I was too new to recognise, the usurper's decent son. A true queen, a hidden name, a slow burn over a banked fire, and a revenge that is quietly turning into something far more dangerous than revenge: the wish to remake a kingdom instead of simply burning it down.