Gold Spun from an Unmarked Grave

To save a dying brother from a tyrant’s salt mines, an outcast gravedigger makes a pact with a buried king-unleashing a living gold that will either buy their freedom or drag an empire into the abyss.In the frozen reaches of Oakhaven, winter does not merely chill; it buries. Marjolaine knows the price of survival by the frostbite on her knuckles and the ringing of iron shovels against unyielding permafrost. Alongside her adoptive father, Isaac Mercer, she carves shallow pits for the famine-dead, scraping the bottom of pickling jars while nursing her ten-year-old brother, Daniel, whose chest rattles with an icy, unnatural cough.When Duke Oliver Sterling’s enforcers arrive to extract an impossible midwinter tithe, Bailiff Raymond West marks Daniel for the imperial salt mines-a death sentence for a sickly child. Driven by feral desperation, Marjolaine defies ancient taboos and enters the primeval Weeping Woods, prying open the stone slab of an unmarked subterranean barrow.Beneath the tangled roots, she encounters Gabriel Ross-an entombed sovereign half-petrified in clay, seated before a colossal bedrock loom. Gabriel offers salvation, but at a visceral price: shorn hair, cemetery soil, and her own sliced palm. From this grim harvest, his bone shuttle spins shimmering, unnaturally warm golden thread.The golden yarn buys a temporary reprieve, yet it only ignites Duke Sterling’s insatiable greed. Summoned to the High Citadel, Marjolaine discovers that the realm’s starvation is deliberate. High Artificer Grace Montgomery is feeding miles of the thread into clockwork conduits and bearing walls, constructing an alchemically sealed sarcophagus to grant the Duke immortal life while leaving the realm to rot.The nightmare deepens when Marjolaine realizes that court apothecary Dr. Lukas Schneider has not been treating Daniel, but poisoning him with changeling draughts to hollow out his body-preparing the boy as an empty vessel to house the Duke’s soul on the solstice.As the winter storm crests, Isaac Mercer confesses the secret he kept for decades: Marjolaine is the last bloodline heir of the primeval Rootborn, and the spun gold is not inert metal, but living mycelium threaded through every arch of the citadel. With a bone spindle carved from an ancient king’s rib, Marjolaine holds the trigger to a colossal subterranean trap. To rescue her brother, she must awaken the roots and pull the dynasty down into the dark.Gold Spun from an Unmarked Grave is a tactile, dread-soaked gothic fairy tale of ferocious familial love, ancestral vengeance, and the price of salvation. Perfect for readers of Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale and Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, this dark masterpiece will linger long after the final page.