Hi everyone,

I wanted to stop in with another update on Curse of the Fallen Fairy, and this time, I wanted to share a little more about where things actually stand.

First, I know this book has taken far longer than any of us anticipated. I know you've been waiting, and as the publisher and one of the authors of this story, I take responsibility for seeing it through and getting it into your hands.

I've also been navigating a life-changing health diagnosis that has required me to make some significant changes in my day-to-day life, including how I work and how much I can realistically accomplish at one time. I'm doing well, but I've had to learn that I can't always work at the pace I once did.

That has meant some things are moving more slowly than I would like.

And Curse of the Fallen Fairy is very much one of them.

I'm currently working in Chapter 31, and we're now moving through the final portion of the story. I've been steadily adding to the manuscript, bringing together threads that have been building throughout the book and working toward the ending we've been trying to reach for a very long time.

Rather than giving you another update that simply says, "We're still working on it," though, I'd rather show you.

So today, I'm sharing another chapter from Curse of the Fallen Fairy.

This is an unedited excerpt straight from the working manuscript. It hasn't gone through its final editing or polishing yet, and things may still change before publication.

But it's real progress.

It's part of the book you're waiting for.

And I hope you'll enjoy stepping back into this world with us for a little while.

Thank you for continuing to give this story your patience. I know you've given us a lot of it, and I don't take that for granted.

Now, let's get back to Wisteria.

Tina

Despite its blend of shadows, moonlight filtered through the overhead canopy, lightly silvering the forest floor. The woods were alive. Small animals scurried about in the underbrush, their presence revealed only by their movement. An owl nearby hooted, and the steady clop of our horses’ hooves on the dirt path. A sense of peace settled over me, as though I could truly breathe for the first time.

Realizing this, I inhaled deeply, pulling the fresh, cool night air into my lungs. How could it be that I’d been starving for breath that I didn’t guard? A breath without restrictions? The simple act felt foreign. My shoulders relaxed and that breath seemed to flow through my whole body until my fingertips tingled.

The forest did not feel like danger.

That bothered me more than if it had.

Every story I’d ever been told about these woods painted them in rot and ruin; this was supposed to be a place where the foolish went and the wise avoided. Yet here, beneath a canopy so thick the moonlight arrived in fragments, I felt something I hadn’t felt inside the Academy’s walls in three months.

Still.

Not safe. Not quite. But still.

I didn’t trust it.

“You’ve gone quiet,” Edan said from ahead. He hadn’t looked back, but then he rarely needed to. It was an irritating quality.

“I’m always quiet.”

“You’re never quiet. You just aim your noise inward.” He ducked a low branch without breaking stride, his silver horse navigating the undergrowth with the easy confidence of an animal that had done this before. “It’s louder than shouting, if you know how to listen.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. “That is possibly the most insufferable thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“Give me time.”

Despite myself, something new loosened in my chest. Not much, but enough.

The trees thinned slightly ahead, the ground leveling into a narrow deer path that cut northeast. Edan slowed his horse to let me draw alongside him. In the dark, with the courtly polish stripped away, without guards, audience, or political geometry to navigate, he looked different. Less assembled. The weathered riding coat was pushed back from his shoulders, his hair catching the fractured moonlight, and the double swords crossed at his back were not decorative. Nothing about him, I was beginning to understand, was decorative.

I looked away before he caught me looking.

“You said you had information about Claire.” I kept my voice even. I had learned long ago that the moment you revealed how much something mattered, it became leverage. “You didn’t drag me through a forest and drop two soldiers to leave that sentence unfinished.”

“I didn’t drag you anywhere. You threw yourself through a servants’ passage.”

“Edan.”

He exhaled slowly. Not reluctantly, but more like a man deciding how much of a weight to hand someone, calculating whether they could carry it. His jaw tightened.

“She came to me,” he said finally. “Six weeks before they took her. She said she’d found something in the restricted archive, something the Concordance had sealed three generations back. She wouldn’t tell me what. Said the less I knew in specifics, the safer I was.”

The deer path narrowed and our horses fell into single file again. I stared at his back.

The line of his shoulders. He held himself even here, even alone, with a straightness that wasn’t performance but structure. Something built so deep it had become simply the shape of him.

I looked at the trees instead.

“She gave you something.” I could feel it. The shape of the thing he was building toward. I don’t know how, but we entered these woods in the shape of prince and an escaped prisoner. Now if felt as though he was morphing before my eyes, easing into a version of himself I didn’t yet know.

A pause. “Her journal.”

The words landed quietly between us like a stone slipping beneath still water.

Claire’s journal. The one she’d kept since we were girls. The one she’d been writing in the night before they dragged her away, hunched over it by candlelight while I braided her hair, her shoulders curved around it like she was shielding a small flame from wind.

“She said—” Edan’s voice shifted, something careful moving through it. “She said the only person I should trust with it was you. That you’d know what to do with it more than anyone.”

I said nothing. The ache of it sat in my throat like something swallowed wrong.

“I haven’t read all of it,” he added. “Parts of it aren’t…some of it is in a cipher I haven’t broken. But what I could read—” He stopped. The horses moved. The cicadas filled the silence. “It points toward the Nightshade realm.”

“Of course it does.” My voice came out flatter than I intended.

“Belle—”

“She always went further than anyone needed her to go.” I didn’t mean it as criticism. It was just true. Claire had never been able to leave a locked door alone. It had been her best trait and the thing that killed her. “She knew it was going to get her killed and she went anyway.”

“She thought she could get out before they noticed.”

“She thought a lot of things.” My hands tightened on the reins. “Where is the journal now?”

“Saddlebag. Left side.” He glanced back then, briefly. Just long enough for our eyes to meet in the dark.

He held my gaze one beat longer than necessary.

I looked away first.

“Tonight, when we camp, I want to show you what I found,” he continued, as though nothing had happened, his voice even and unhurried. “There’s a section where her handwriting changes. Goes smaller, faster. The way she wrote when she was frightened.” He looked forward again. “I think she knew exactly what was going to happen to her. I think she left a map.”

A map. For me.

I should have been angry. That she’d known and hadn’t told me, had sent me into grief blind, had trusted a prince with her secrets while I scrubbed stairs with a toothbrush and mourned her. But I couldn’t quite reach, instead only only this vast, exhausted tenderness for a girl who had always tried to protect everyone around her and trusted a prince with her secrets because she’d believed, right to the end, that I was worth protecting.

Whatever you do, you must promise me.

“She trusted you,” I said quietly. “With the only thing that mattered.”

“She trusted you.” He corrected it without hesitation. “I was just the safest pair of hands between then and now.”

I had no answer for that. The trees closed back in around us and the deer path bent northeast and I let the silence hold what I couldn’t.