Serpent’s Thaw - Livia Crane

I TOOK THE WORST POST IN THE VALLEY BECAUSE IT PAID MY TEACHER’S DEBT.

One winter at Coldharbour - a derelict waystation on a pass nobody crosses once the snow comes. Mend the roof, keep the hearth, send the accounts down in spring. Nobody mentioned what lived underneath it.

I’m a herbalist, which mostly means I am good at reading damage. The house was failing in six places. The stable floor had a crack in it wide enough to lose a lamp down. And past the crack, in a cavern of pale blue stone above still water, something enormous was keeping a winter plum tree alive, and losing.

Vashaal is a god. He is also a serpent the length of the cavern, and he has no hands. He can warm the ground and carry water and do nothing else - which is why the tree is dying, and why I can save it. He has been down there a hundred years. The last person who came to him stayed until he died.

So we wrote terms. What I could take, what I would not cut, where I was allowed to put my hands. Then the pass closed, and the terms stopped being about the tree.

The warm ground is shrinking, a finger at a time, and I am the only one measuring it. The man who holds my debt is coming up the road with a Guild clerk and a lock for the door. The one thing standing between them and the ground Vashaal has kept for a century is a god who has never once let himself be seen.

I could have left. The road opened. I had the money in my purse and my pack already tied.

"Everything I’d made in three years had to be ready before I was."

Coldharbour is a shelter on a dead road. It has a hearth, a keeper, and a god underneath it.

Cozy monster romance · explicit

Slow burn · forced proximity · touch-starved · found family · negotiated consent · grumpy recluse · HEA

Standalone romance, first in The Hearth Gods. The monster never turns human. That is the entire point.