Bran has kept the archive at Castle Ashryn for twelve years and has never been trained for anything.She came to it at forty-eight, after a life that had ended, because the post was cold and did not pay, and nobody else would take it. She is slow. She does not find things; she waits, and they surface. And she has one discipline, which is that she will not decide before she has established.Then a letter arrives asking about eleven men who left this castle in Year 388 for a country nobody knew existed.What Bran finds is a line of dust along a shelf.Somebody has been checking that run for a decade. There are four people in those rooms, and she knows how every one of them moves, and only one of them runs his fingers along the spines when he is thinking.Cadan has brought her the worst tea in the Nightbound Court at the fourth hour every day for twelve years. He taught her this work when she could not do it. He is the best reader of a hand in two countries, and there is no document anywhere that can tell her whether a man touches a shelf because he is thinking or because he is counting.She can hold two readings of a document for four days. She has never had to hold two readings of a person.SHADOWSWORN is a slow-burn fantasy romance about buried professions, an older heroine who refuses to guess, and a man who has been waiting thirty years for somebody to ask him a question. Open-door romance. Full happily ever after.The final book of The Nightbound Pact. Begin with Shadowbound.Contains grief, bereavement, the historical death of a child, the taking and institutional training of children, terminal illness, and the deaths of named characters.
