TIDE OF ASHES Book Two of the Scent of Cinders Series By Daisia Puyear The North was won in blood and ash. But the war for the continent was only the beginning. Picking up immediately in the explosive aftermath of SCENT OF CINDERS, the saga of the Ash Queen continues… For nineteen winters, Lyra Morvath was the Ashhound—a starved, beaten cellar stray whose nose was weaponized to track fated mates, while her own beast remained chained beneath an occult brand. Now, the brand has been shattered. The tyrant Alphas have fallen, and alongside her true mate—the brutal, scarred warlord Gideon Drake—Lyra sits upon the reclaimed Ash Throne, ruling a united North. Yet their victory bells have barely ceased before the shadows of an even deadlier enemy darken their waters. A golden dreadnought has crossed the Sunken Straits. Nineteen years ago, as forty thousand wolves battered down her citadel gates, Lyra’s dying mother made a desperate pact with the Solar Dominion—an opulent, seafaring empire built upon harvested bloodlines and enslaved sea-gods. In exchange for the secret that hid her infant daughter from the slaughter, Sovereign Vespera pledged Lyra’s hand, her womb, and the sovereignty of the North to the immortal Sun Emperor, Aurelius the Undying. Aurelius is rotting from within. Stricken by the Solar Rot—a horrific curse that calcifies an emperor’s veins into molten glass—his only salvation is the pure, living starlight of a true Morvath Sovereign's marrow. He didn't come to negotiate an alliance; he came to collect his bride as living medicine, threatening to burn the North to ash if she refuses to kneel. Mounted upon their colossal volcanic war-drake, Cinder, Lyra and Gideon refuse to wait on their shores to be slaughtered. Leading an elite vanguard of Void-dancers into the uncharted horrors of the Leviathan Trench, they launch an audacious counter-invasion into the heart of the Gilded Archipelago. In this high-stakes continuation, Lyra must push her Weave-Severing abilities to their absolute limit, shatter the imperial covenants powering the Emperor’s armada, and unleash primordial beasts of the deep. Together, Lyra and Gideon will prove that an empire built on stolen chains can never cage a queen forged in the cinders. They caged her as a hound. They will bleed before her as a queen.
