The Costs of Magic

Every magic has a cost. Brewers give back to the earth. Innates spend from their own souls. Casters take from whatever—or whoever—is closest. The most dangerous witches are the ones who decided the cost was someone else's to bear.

When Gwen was ten years old, she watched through a pinhole as something murdered her mother and took her head. Fourteen years later, the killings have started again—and the magic her mother died to hide is finally waking up inside her. Armed with a dead woman's dress, a talking cat, and the ability to feel every lie like a needle under her skin, she infiltrates the royal court that cast her out. What she finds there is worse than a monster.

The peace between two worlds was built on secrets—royal bloodlines with hidden powers, a gate between realms held shut by oaths and sacrifice, and children raised to inherit a kingdom without ever being told what they were truly guarding. Now those children are grown, scattered, and dangerously undertrained in the powers they were born with. And the rot, it turns out, was always inside the foundation.

The Costs of Magic is a dark fantasy about inherited power and the people who weaponize it, about parents and children and the terrible things love justifies, and about the particular courage it takes to let yourself be known—fully, honestly, without the disguise—when everything you've survived has taught you that hiding is safer.

Every ingredient that can heal can also harm. What closes a wound can open one. What salves a burn can start a fire.