Arcfire

His secret is a diplomatic crisis. Her secret is a death sentence for both of them. The only way home is together.

He wanted to build engines and fly. But his province is sending representatives for the first time in fifty years, and he is one of them. The other senator is the last person he wanted to be bound to for a six-year term.

Before he can leave for the capital, a mountain festival takes them east to the border, where Mountain Clans from both nations gather on neutral ground. His companion wears her religious charm openly. She should not have.

A well-connected host invites them to dinner. The wine is good. They awake aboard an airship flying east, prisoners of a nation where her faith is a capital crime and her blood carries a secret that could get them both killed.

They have no money, no papers, and no way home. He speaks the language. She cannot read the signs on the buildings. Survival depends on a family name he has never used, tied to a mother who left him as a child and a bloodline buried on the wrong side of the mountains in an enemy nation.

But family here comes with obligations no one explained.

Family honor compels him to the front lines of a war he was never supposed to join. She fights a quieter war, smiling across a dinner table at a family that would kill her if they knew the truth.