The Witch Who Made Mercy Dangerous

When love becomes useful, it becomes dangerous.

Marrow can feel again. Every emotion she recovers – grief, fury, wanting – is visible to the man who built a system around her sister's compulsion and documents feelings the way other people document inventory. Her love for a god who waited seven hundred years is not private. It is a variable in someone else's operating model.

Sorrel cannot refuse a prayer. A well-meaning administrator has turned that fact into infrastructure: intake forms, session schedules, overnight dormitories where petitioners sleep near enough to trigger answers Sorrel will never remember giving. The system helps people. It is consuming Sorrel to do it. Both are true. Neither cancels the other.

To break the machine, Marrow will have to stop documenting from the margins and step into the center of the room – with full feeling, in front of everyone who built the record. A god will refuse. A sister will try to say no. And a woman who lost her own name will discover that the most dangerous thing in an institutional system is someone who lets the room see exactly what she is willing to feel.

Book 3 of the Witches & Gods series. For readers of Katherine Arden and Naomi Novik who believe the most frightening villain is the one who is genuinely trying to help.