Gilded Hall Devotion
Jace Kingsley
In Aurumhall, gold isn’t decoration—it’s a language of power, debt, and oaths that can bind harder than chains. Lyra Maren knows how to survive with words. A court translator and performer drowning in borrowed coin, she expects her newest job to be another polished lie: become the court’s ceremonial Devotion, a living symbol meant to soothe alliances and steady a fragile throne.
Then an assassin strikes at her first public appearance, using a poison only dwarven nobility can access.
Suddenly the danger isn’t outside the Hall—it’s inside its gilded walls.
Four formidable dwarves are assigned to protect her: a shield-captain forged from loyalty, a chancellor whose intellect cuts like glass, a jeweler-lord who hides runes in beauty, and a warden with “no one touches her” fury. But as attacks escalate—masked balls, coded letters, stolen schedules—Lyra finds secret passages and a hidden mural of a human infant in dwarven hands… wearing a pendant identical to hers.
If the Hall remembers her, what else is it hiding? And when her bloodline becomes the spark for civil war, Lyra must choose: disappear as a pawn… or claim the oath-magic beneath the court and rewrite the rules that were meant to cage her.
