Early Reviewers

She was sent to be a weapon. He was sent to bring her home to die.

In the kingdom of Caer Vethys, every child is bonded to a beast — and every bond is the crown's hand on a leash. Lirien Voss arrives at the academy knowing only what she has been told: that her father did not look at her when she left, that her name belonged to a woman who was hanged, and that she is to be forged into a weapon for a throne that fears her house.

Kael Aravane is the cadet ordered to win her trust and deliver her for execution. He has been deciding against that order since he was thirteen.

Beneath the academy runs a resistance nineteen years in the making, and at its center waits a creature older than the throne — older than the lie the kingdom was built on. To choose each other, Lirien and Kael will have to betray everything they were made to be.

Bone breaks. Bond does not.

Book One of the Bone and Bond Cycle —a literary fantasy of conspiracy, inheritance, and the slow work of ending an empire, for readers of The Goblin Emperor and The Priory of the Orange Tree.