Every year, the kingdom pays the Hollow King one memory from every citizen. This year, he took the prince's memory of the girl he loved — and she is the only one who remembers everything.
In Vessia, the Tithe keeps the Pale Rot at bay: one memory a year from every citizen, poured into the Hollow Crown, worn by a king who has not aged or spoken in forty years. Lyra Fen collects those memories — and hides a treasonous secret. The Tithe cannot take from her. Her mind keeps everything, perfectly, and always has.
On Tithe Day, the prince is tithed on the palace steps as theatre for the crowd — and as his memory pours out, he looks straight at Lyra and mouths her childhood nickname. A name no living person should know. The vial that lands in her hands holds the night his mother died — the night the Crown has spent ten years erasing from him, and the official story says she died of a fever.
To keep that vial out of the Crown's hands, Lyra pays with the one memory she swore she never would: her own mother's lullaby. Then the palace audit seals every Collector inside — and the prince hunting the leak assigns the thief to inventory the vaults beside him. Forty years of shelved lives. A surplus the ledgers can't explain. A Rot that has been retreating for a decade while the Tithe never shrank. And in the oldest vault of all, a row of vials in her dead mother's handwriting.
Enemies to lovers · forced proximity · he falls first · a secret inheritance · a villain who might be right. The Memory Tithe is the first book of The Hollow Crown trilogy — a clean romantasy of memory, choice, and the price of forgetting, with a happy-for-now ending and a final page that begins Book Two.
