The Bone Orchard

The Bone Orchard For a hundred years, the kingdom of Duncairn has celebrated the Ending—the legendary defeat of eleven dragons whose bones became the foundations of Carrowmere. Bridges, furnaces, towers, and entire districts were built from the remains of the creatures the realm calls its enemies. Sorcha Cormorant, the last heir of the Order of the Ending, has spent her life believing the story. But Sorcha has always heard something beneath the city. A low, patient song vibrating through the stone. On the night of her investiture, she is sent beneath Carrowmere to perform the ancient rite over the eleven fallen dragons. Instead, she discovers an impossible secret: the dragons were never killed. They entered a magical sleep beneath the city, growing into a vast subterranean orchard of living bone and luminous blossoms. And the kingdom has been mining them for generations. Worse still, the oldest lie of the realm is beginning to collapse. The dragon whose wing was cut away to create Sorcha's ancestral sword, Mercy, has awakened—and she remembers everything. Her name is Aithne. Wingless, weakened, and furious after a century of being treated as a resource, Aithne should be Sorcha's enemy. Instead, she becomes the first person to reveal the truth behind Sorcha's bloodline, her mother's death, and the ancient song that has called to her since childhood. As the crown prepares to expand the mines into the heart of the Bone Orchard, Sorcha must choose between the kingdom she was raised to protect and the beings whose stolen bones built it. But the deeper Sorcha ventures into the orchard, the more complicated her bond with Aithne becomes. What begins as an uneasy alliance between keeper and dragon slowly develops into something neither of them expected—and something the kingdom cannot afford to discover. To save the sleeping dragons, Sorcha may have to betray her inheritance, expose a century-old lie, and decide what she is willing to sacrifice for a woman who was once called her enemy. Because the Ending was never an ending. It was a beginning built on stolen bones.