The Bone Carver's Apprentice
A Novel of Stolen Faces

About this book:

In the rotting cellars of Oakhaven, bone carver's apprentice Aveline scratches a living from stag horn and ox rib, hiding the forbidden truth: she hears the whispers of the dead in the marrow. When a dying man's courier presses a fragment of luminous human skull into her hands—a relic etched with the outlawed script of the Old Empire—Aveline touches it and witnesses a murder in a room of lilies and blood. The victim wears a silver circlet. The victim has violet eyes. The victim is Princess Aurelia, vanished on the eve of the Festival of the Sun.

Now the King's Huntsmen and their marrow-sniffing hounds are combing the lower wards, and Aveline's master insists they carve only "things that don't talk back." But the bone in Aveline's pocket sings a different truth: this skull wasn't carved to honor the dead. It was carved to steal a face. And the lineage written in its microscopic letters reveals a succession crisis that could burn the city to ash.

Hunted by the Crown's enforcers and haunted by a dead princess's memories, Aveline must master the ancient, lethal art of the First Dynasty carvers—before the Festival's final dawn, when a false face will sit the throne, and the real slaughter begins.