Llelo

An exiled princess, a poisoned husband, and a battle for power—Eirian Soliel refuses to be forgotten, but can she turn a cold marriage into a fiery alliance before it’s too late?

First cousin to the King and the darling of the Court of Sorrow, Eirian has spent most of her life indulging all her whims and fantasies under the protection of her royal blood, but when her father’s sudden re-marriage results in a son, she finds herself suddenly shuffled aside.

On top of that, her longtime on-and-off romantic partner suddenly betrays her. Instead of proposing to her, he shows up to her birthday ball, married to a low-ranked Lady without a word of warning.

Eirian’s life is upended, and her stepmother succeeds in exiling her into an arranged marriage with a general who never leaves the distant borderland. Regimented, completely disinterested in the capitol and the Court, and dying from a poison no one can identify, her new husband would rather continue his simple life with his mistress than welcome his new wife, but Eirian refuses to go down without fight.

Determined to make a place for herself if she cannot find one, Eirian finds herself facing an enemy she never expected, and she underestimates her shy, gentle husband.

Will the General fall for his vivacious Princess, or will Eirian be set aside again?

Moonfire & Midnight

Eirian studies the man she's supposed to marry in a matter of minutes now. The agreement had stipulated that the wedding to this young lord of what is one of the last great military houses of the Land of Sorrow take place the day she arrived.

Another way to ensure Eirian was well and truly trapped.

Honestly, she's a bit impressed. She hadn't thought her stepmother, the Honorable Lady Brigitta Soleil (nee Stallworth), was that intelligent, but apparently, she'd underestimated her.

It's not a mistake she plans to make again.

The age of glory and conquest in Sorrow is long past. The kingdom has been focused on elevating what it has instead of expanding for the last several generations and there are more internal conflicts than external. Given the stability of the surrounding kingdoms, it couldn't expand outward without a significant conflict that could easily result in Sorrow's defeat.

Excluding, of course, the borderlands where battlefield glory and bloody standards can still be found, the rest of the land makes do with settling gambling hall debts and old family grudges on the dueling fields.

But even those are not what they were a hundred years ago. The borders have solidified as the treaty between the Land of Sorrow and the Land of Song and Snow has held strong. Rulers in both kingdoms have been surprisingly unwilling to fall back into large scale warfare and the borderlands, while fruitful, are not so valuable to two countries wealthy enough to import what they need to make up for the loss.

The only ones upset about it are the tribes that occupy said borderlands and who refused to recognize any claims but their own. But that same refusal is why neither country bothered to care about them anymore.

In its heyday, the Camelia was the gem of the Land of Sorrow. It had glittered just as brightly as Aontacht, the great capital of the United Kingdom. Representing Sorrow's military might, in contrast to Aontacht's peace and wisdom. In the wars against Song and Snow it had been that bastion of all hope and at some of the lowest points in Sorrow's history, pulled out victories that had changed the course of the kingdom's fate. The Land of Sorrow had added a red camelia to its official symbol hundreds of years ago as a gesture to honor the estate's sacrifices in its name.

But as soon as the age of warfare had ended, so had any major interest in the Camelia.

Warriors were easily shuffled aside in times of peace when no one wanted to remember the horrors that had gotten them there.

She isn't sure how long the Ye family has controlled the Camelia, but it has to have been at least five or six generations. She feels a stab of regret that she didn't look for more information before she was unceremoniously forced out of the capital.

She could always write to her cousin, but as the King's only surviving child, he's busy fighting for his life against others who wanted his throne, and she was wary of distracting him.

Ye Chenzhou should be around the same age, despite his gaunt appearance. Has he met her cousin the prince? Even if Ye never travelled to the capital, the prince frequently moved about the kingdom to see to concerns the King didn't want to deal with and to shore up his own support. They may have run into one another before, though they could not look more different. Her cousin shares her coloring and the tall, broad build of their people. Ye Chenzhou would look small and pale next to him.

Some men didn't have ego's that could take that.

The miasma was crawling up his legs now, she noticed. Gaining inches as he stood still, watching her.

It could gain no purchase on Eirian herself. Her magic was far too strong, but it seemed to-

She frowned and looked closer. The miasma looked like it was crawling all over him, squirming like worms trying to dig back into the ground, but the movement was…odd.

The miasma was not infecting Ye Chenzhou, it was coming from him.

7