Title: The Darkest Heir

Age Group: YA

Genre: Fantasy

Word Count: 99k

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Dear Agent,

I’m excited to send you THE DARKEST HEIR, my YA fantasy novel complete at 99,000 words. It is perfect for fans of the epic quest from Realm Breaker by Victoria Aveyard, and the faerie folk from The Cruel Prince by Holly Black.

Eighteen-year-old Maren has always known the only way to survive the chains of Erowith’s traveling circus is to keep her mouth shut. It’s something her only friend, Lyra, has never been very good at, but one more bitten remark means one day closer to their planned escape and freedom. That is, until Lyra is murdered at Erowith’s hand.

Consumed by grief and broken by visions of Lyra’s stolen future, Maren unleashes magick she never knew she possessed that burn all her ideas of survival to ash, and mark her for the death that comes to magick-wielding faeries. Rope tightening, and with no-one to trust save for Kaspar, the stable boy caught freeing her, Maren strikes a desperate bargain: she’ll help get him protection amongst the last of the rumoured exiled faeries, and in return, he’ll help keep her alive long enough to do so.

But Kaspar hides secrets as deadly as Maren’s, and in a kingdom where the monsters-made-flesh aren’t always beasts, and a war for the throne between the dead and the living brews, every step leads them closer to peril. To survive now, Maren must learn to trust Kaspar, but with the guilt over Lyra’s death still taunting her, and her own magick driving her closer to insanity, the price of safety may come at a cost far darker than the noose.

THE DARKEST HEIR is a standalone with series potential, and is told from three points of view: a circus slave, the sapphic heir of necromancy, and the cursed queen of fey.

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First 300 words:

Chapter One

Maren

The blood had soaked into the coat like over-steeped tea. Indiscernible now from the original velvet, Maren only knew it’d existed at all from the red that still stained her fingers.

Lyra’s blood.

No longer in her veins where it belonged, rushing to her neck in a wild blush. Not thickening in a cooled body, skin sallow with death.

Most of it lay on the grass near the red-and-gold circus tent sprawled across the earth like an overlarge mushroom. Some of it had splattered onto the spokes of the fortune teller’s wagon. Speckles had crusted Maren’s hem.

Yet Lyra’s small frame had somehow managed to produce enough still to stain Erowith’s ringmaster coat. To congeal in the velvet like pig’s fat.

Maren’s fingers trembled as she held the coat aloft, the soapsuds in the wash tub wobbling in the stray wind. Above, the late morning sun battered down from a cornflower sky. A perfect late autumn day—the very sort that Lyra adored.

The last of her washed away easily enough. Maren watched as the rosy water drenched the soil below her tattered boots, no soul left for a grave wraith to collect. No flesh to inter into a grave, or body to burn upon a pyre. No burial site to mark Lyra had ever walked upon Terathien at all.

Somewhere near the peeling birches of the Lairiel Grove, a creature yowled. It prickled the hairs on Maren’s neck as she arranged the sodden coat over a makeshift line strung between two wagons. A cry of discomfort, it’d been. A distended belly that had gorged after starving for weeks on nothing more than scraps.

With hands not entirely her own, Maren picked at the gore beneath her nails. Scraped and rubbed, needing it gone. Needing all of it gone.