The Smoke-Reader's Vigil (The Thornridge Fires #2)
Kora Valeka
Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.
She speaks four languages fluently. She has never once said what she means.
Alma Trace is the youngest senior translator in the Lowland Trade Commission — impeccable, composed, technically still engaged to a Merchant Council heir her father chose because her fluency in Thornridge Orc made her the ideal bridge-wife for a mineral-rights dynasty. She called it a reasonable arrangement. She believed it. She is twenty-six years old and has never been asked what she wants.
The Commission sends her to Keth Ashfall — a remote signal-fire mesa, permanent ash-haze, and a smoke-reader who has no use for her considerable diplomatic skill.
Nethrak doesn't need a translator. He needs her to sit down.
In Thornridge culture, watching a fire without performing value — without translating, negotiating, arranging — is an act of radical trust. Nethrak offers it to Alma like it costs nothing. Like she deserves it. Like she is a person, not a function. And the fire-share bond forming through weeks of signal-fire vigils — his smoke-and-ember scent seeping into her formal robes, her restless sad scent settling into his ash-darkened furs — doesn't care at all about her engagement, her Commission, or the letter from her father that just arrived.
The treaty signing is in three days. Her fiancé wants the ceremony moved forward. Her composure is three weeks of shared firelight from shattering entirely.
She was built to translate other people's words. What happens when she finally speaks her own?
