The Rootkeeper's Claim (The Blackbark Testaments #3)
Kora Valeka
Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.
She came to get a signature. He won't give her a lie.
Catrin has run Halden Vale for three years under her dead brother's name. She did not plan to become him — it was what the estate required when he died without issue and the law had no provision for an unmarried sister. Competence is not armor for Catrin. It is identity. The only thing she still privately owns.
Zheryk keeps the Blackbark's living boundary maps — root-drawn records of every territorial claim the forest has witnessed. Exiled for his father's treachery, he trusts root systems over declared loyalties. He scents Catrin's true sex, her hidden witness-blood, and the fated mating bond within thirty seconds of her arrival. He does not authenticate the boundary testament she presents. The living roots have already rejected it.
He will not lie to the archive on her behalf. Not even for her.
What follows is a forced legal partnership between a woman who has been someone else for three years and an orc incapable of confirming the fiction. When her cousin files a challenge that will reach judgment before the principality's next session, the only path that can save Halden Vale requires Catrin to stand in the canopy court as herself — her real name, her witness-blood, visibly claimed and impossible to erase.
She spent three years becoming her brother. Can she become herself before the archive closes?
