The Witch and The Spare

"That's what they do to people like us," her mother had whispered. "That's what fear makes them become."

Eleanor was seven the first time she watched a woman hang for witchcraft. She was eleven the night her own magic rose to answer her father's hands, and a priest in crimson robes stepped out of the mob to claim her before anyone could light the kindling.

He called it salvation. Then he burned her village to the ground so no one could call it anything else.

Now she is Wren: silent, watched, quietly extraordinary. The secret instrument of a Royal Confessor whose ambitions reach far past the crown he serves. Only one person in the palace sees her clearly: Prince Kaelen, the second-born son with nothing of his own but a gift for noticing what everyone else overlooks.

What begins as stolen friendship deepens into something that could destroy them both. Because Father Thaddeus has spent seven years sharpening Wren toward a single moment, and when it comes, in a cathedral draped in wedding silk, the only weapon that can stop him is the one he forged himself.

A slow-burn romantasy of faith, power, and the long, patient work of becoming unbreakable.