What the Glass Keeps
Linnea Hart blows wedding goblets in a snowbound mortal town and hides what her glass does that no glass should: it holds light after the flame is gone.
Early access opens in batches. Invite friends to skip ahead.
The story
The story
Linnea Hart blows wedding goblets in a snowbound mortal town and hides what her glass does that no glass should: it holds light after the flame is gone.
Then a letter arrives under pale blue wax. The Hollow Court needs a crown of exactly that glass, in fifteen nights, before the veil between the worlds shuts on midwinter's eve. Refusal will be recorded.
The king who comes to her shop himself is Orrin Dasker: two hundred years old, used to being obeyed, and not in the habit of asking. The treaty has a princess picked out for him; he has picked Linnea. When a needle comes for her throat on her first night at court, he crosses the hall and says she is under his protection.
She takes the commission on six terms of her own and says no to the marriage. He says he can wait. Kings wait badly, she tells him, and privately wonders whether they are warm at the throat.
A steamy fae-court romantasy about a crown and a freely given yes.
Spice map
Where it gets hot
Heat, chapter by chapter. No spoilers, just warning.
The world
Know your way around
Place
- Harrowmere
- The snowbound mortal town where Linnea keeps her shop: one lane, candles in the windows, an inn that strung holly over its lintel early, and a baker whose boy sweeps his step and touches his cap. Every child there gets an old rhyme with their porridge about a hollow court that comes riding when the mere gives back its cold. Half a mile out on that mere is the veil.
- The veil
- The border between Harrowmere and the Hollow Court: a standing shimmer between two standing stones at the end of an old causeway, half a mile out on the mere, where the ice never thickens and no net is ever set. It is cold, still and exact, and it shuts on midwinter's eve. The last maker who crossed it came home fevered and alive a hundred years ago. The king says the fever is the crossing, not the court.
Magic
- Light-holding glass
- Linnea's gift, which has no name in Harrowmere because names get things taken: glass that keeps light burning past the wick and past the oil. Once, years ago, a lamp of hers kept burning after its oil was gone. 'Light remembers where it was born,' the king tells her. 'Most glass lets it fade at the door. Yours keeps it on past the wick, past the oil, past reason.'
Character
- Linnea Hart
- A glassblower in Harrowmere who sells glass to everyone in town twice and blows lamps, bottles and wedding goblets like any other maker. Her glass can also keep a light burning after the flame is gone. She has hidden that for five years, since a buyer broke one of her lamps on his boot heel in the market, and now a letter with her name in it has put her secret in ink.
- Orrin Dasker
- The king, who comes to Linnea's shop himself after the letter. He is tall as a doorframe and old as the church stones, leaves no footprint in fresh snow, and keeps his hands folded behind his back. He gives his name as 'Orrin' and his title as 'King,' gives her fifteen nights to make the crown, and then lets the last step across the line stay hers.
Object
- Mistress Alder's goblets
- Twelve wedding goblets that Linnea has just finished when the letter comes, paid for half in advance and cooling in the annealer for a day and a half. She signs each base with her thumb while the glass is soft, and gives the twelfth one more breath than the rest, so the wedding will have 'eleven goblets and one insult.'
- The crown
- What the summons is for: a crown for the joining of two courts, in glass that holds light beyond the reach of its flame, with Linnea named as its maker. The letter comes under pale blue wax pressed with a ring that has a door left open, and it ends 'Refusal will be recorded.' The king gives her fifteen nights, until the veil shuts on midwinter's eve, and says there is no other glass.
- The shard
- A curved piece of glass the size of her palm, wrapped in a scrap of wool: all that is left of the lamp a buyer smashed in the market five years ago. Linnea picked it out of the gutter with cut hands. Her mother would call keeping it sentiment; she calls it evidence, proof on the bad nights that she did not dream the whole thing. She carries it in her inside pocket, over her heart.
Faction
- The Hollow Court
- The court that has written to Linnea. Its letter says that 'in the hundredth year of its accord' it requires a crown for the joining of two courts, by order of its council, in the king's name. Harrowmere's rhyme says it takes a maker for its crown every hundred years and gives back nothing worth the keeping. The king says the rhyme is town-made and half wrong.
Spoiler-safe. Only what you learn in chapter 1.
