Heiress of Magic

In the city of mages, faces are stolen, souls held captive, and hearts are bartered for vengeance. The unmagical girl Every day, Lysium and her beautiful, tormented husband dance with magic in order to disseminate spells for the theater guild where they live. Every evening, her husband comes to her bed, but his love is marred by a strange and unfathomable melancholy. And every night, a shadow steals Lysium's happiest moments from her mind. She longs to escape her inexplicably tragic life, but the guild's unseen bonds choke her freedom. The shunned sorceress Despite being the most powerful sorceress in all the Demesnes, Essence Kithrav is a pariah. Shunned for her blood-red eyes, her crooked legs, and her wildly rare magic, she nevertheless protects her city, holding the magical boundaries against an ancient foe. Consigned to days of excruciating loneliness, she begins to exchange letters with a mage from another demesne—a youth who displays his own impossible magic when he heals her disfigured legs. Then he unexpectedly arrives in her city and kisses her for all to see, which only increases the other mages' antagonism toward her. Essence tries to keep him at bay - to please everyone else - but her own heart undermines her will, for he offers her the one thing she cannot resist: love. The mediocre sorceress Melynda has middling power and eleven children, all of whose souls are retained by the guildmaster in exchange for his protection. Together with her assassin lover, she strives to conceal her community from the power-hungry sorcerer who rules their city... but then the guildmaster exposes her eldest daughter to the greatest threat of all. Enter the city of mages, where hearts are the coin of vengeance. Content Warnings: The characters are morally questionable. One character is tricked into sleeping with another without knowing that person's true identity. An unborn baby is stolen from a character's womb.

Born in Texas but somehow having escaped without the accent, Sonya Lano currently lives in Prague, Czech Republic with two cats and a bunch of dust balls, hairballs, fur balls, spiders, story manuscripts, dreams, chocolate, books, and whatever else is hanging around her flat. Her full-time day job testing software pays the bills while her nights are (mostly) filled with living in other worlds.