THE QUEEN’S TITHE

Jennet Aird keeps the records. Rents, tenancies, the burial register she copies out for the minister — and one private ledger she has kept for seven years, with seven dates in it at seven-year intervals and seven names beside them. Her brother is the most recent entry. The whole valley agreed he drowned before anyone thought to drag the water, and she has spent seven years proving they lied.

So on Michaelmas she rides into Carterhaugh in broad daylight, notes the time, counts the roses on the thicket at the double well, and picks one on purpose.

What comes through the trees is a man of nineteen who was taken in 1798.

Before she can get what she came for, there is the question she asks first — not what are you, but what date were you taken — and the way he answers three questions before he understands he is being interviewed. There is the wrist she takes to check for a pulse, entirely clinically, the way she would check a fact, and the full minute afterward when neither of them says anything. There is the afternoon she looks down and finds she has written four words in an hour. There is the folded list she shows him, of everything she is prepared to lose, with the use of my hands as the fourth item — dated six days before she ever touched him. And there is the ride at Miles Cross on Hallows Eve, where a mortal may pull one rider from the saddle and hold on while the Queen turns him into a snake, a bear, a burning brand, and molten iron.

She has spent seven years unable to close a file, because closing it would mean burying him. He has spent a hundred years draining the wanting out of himself, deliberately, decade by decade, because a century of wanting things would have killed him. One night at a crossroads is going to require both of them to do the opposite of everything that has kept them alive.

Dark fantasy romance with frost, blood, and a fae Queen who has never told a lie in four hundred years and is the most frightening thing in the book. The kind of book where the most romantic thing anyone does is write something down before it was romantic.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Fantasy sits at 8.9 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 288 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — the highest-volume segment in fantasy romance, and it is not softening

→ Fantasy > Fairy Tales & Folklore carries an 11.4 sales-to-comp (Hot Niche) — only 3,050 competing titles, making it the fast lane to a category ranking

→ Tam Lin has no adult full-length romance treatment — a named, searchable property with proven reader appetite and no direct competitor

→ The climax is a genuine structural differentiator — the category resolves through combat or bargain; nothing in the top 20 does the holding

→ 1898 Scottish Borders unlocks a third category and differentiates at thumbnail size against the pseudo-medieval default

→ Series framework is built into the premise — the debt, the court, and the valley each generate a book without separating the couple

TROPES:
• Fae Bargain
• Deliberate Heroine
• Forbidden Lover
• Enemies-Adjacent to Lovers
• Secret Pregnancy
• She Saves Him
• Forced Proximity
• Folk Horror Romance
• One Bed in a Ruined Sheiling
• The Villain Never Lies
• Fated by Paperwork

HEAT LEVEL: Open Door / High Spice 

Perfect for fans of: Sarah J. Maas, Hannah Whitten, Heather Fawcett, and Carissa Broadbent