Brynn Arden

You know this story. A princess is cursed at her christening by a wicked fairy, falls into a hundred-year sleep, is awakened by a prince's kiss. The fairy tale is clear about who the villain is. The fairy tale is incomplete. Brynn is a hedge-witch in a village at the edge of the Ardenmere, competent and unremarkable, who spent three years reading a dead woman's journal and slowly understanding what it meant. The journal told her about a negotiation in the deep wood, a king who needed a harvest and an heir, and a debt that would eventually come due. The journal told her when the debt would be called, and who would be claimed when it was. The journal told her that the infant princess was owed to something ancient, patient, and not remotely human—and that no one who could do anything about it was listening. Brynn went to the christening. She tried to warn them. When warning failed, she did the only thing she could think of: she cursed the princess herself. The curse was not malice. It was a working designed to do one specific thing: delay. A hundred years of sleep, protected by a thorn wall, watched over by the witch who cast it. A hundred years for the debt to expire, or for someone to find a solution, or for the princess to grow old enough in her sleep that the thing in the deep wood lost interest. It wasn't a good plan. It was the only plan. *Thornwife* is the fairy tale you know, told by the woman who lived on the other side of the thorn wall. It is Brynn's account of the debt, the curse, the hundred years of watching, and the awakening that followed. It is about a woman who did a terrible thing for a good reason, and who spent a century living with the weight of not knowing if it was enough. The novel unfolds across three acts: the investigation and the casting of the curse; the decades of waiting, watching the thorn wall grow, managing the kingdom's slow acceptance of what happened; and finally the arrival of the prince who would wake the princess, and the conver