Bone Orchard

Charm is a witch and the last survivor of a people who practiced necromancy until conquerors subjugated them. She lives alone within the walls of Orchard House, a yard where bone trees regrow, and where the marrow of those trees holds hidden knowledge. Charm is both a captive and a survivor. She cultivates the trees and their rattling fruit, and from that fruit she has raised the children she has nurtured through painstaking effort: Shame, Justice, Desire, Pride, and Pain.

Orchard House also operates as a brothel, and Charm runs it as its madam. The powerful and wealthy men of Borenguard visit to spend time with its companions, who are not human. On Tuesdays, the Emperor himself visits, claiming Charm as his personal mistress.

Now Charm is the only person capable of holding the empire together. The dying Emperor summons her to his bedside and tasks her with choosing which of his cruel, disloyal sons will succeed him, and she must do so by discovering which son killed him. Completing this task would win her the freedom she has been denied since the fall of Inshil. It would also mean betraying the ghosts of the past and present who live inside her heart. Charm must decide between her dead ruler's will and the whispers of her ghosts, and between justice for the empire and her own revenge.