Arla Jones

Nineteen years earlier, in Hallowmoon, another Nightingale, Elowen Ashsong, ascended the Spire.

When Elowen discovers that the Great Veil is dangerously weaker than the Choir admits, she must choose between refusing the Hymn of Ascension or climbing the Spire knowing she may never return.

Her eleven-year-old son, Chaim, begs her to stay.

Instead, Elowen gives him four notes and one promise:

"If I get lost, play this."

The Hymn saves the Veil.

Elowen disappears.

And nineteen years later, Chaim is still waiting for an answer.

Wella Larksong has spent her whole life playing tavern tunes on a dead man's violin, never asking why the candles bend toward her when she plays. She gets her answer the night the Lumenguard rides into her village looking for a voice born of starblood — and finds it in her.

Swept up to Hallowmoon Spire to train as the next Nightingale, the lone singer whose Hymn keeps the world's oldest wound sealed, Wella learns her predecessor died climbing these same stairs nineteen years ago, and that the official story is a lie. Her fierce, grief-guarded Guard-Captain, Chaim, believes her before she has proof. The kindly Archchancellor who calls her "my dear" does not.

As the Veil begins to fail faster than anyone will admit, Wella has weeks to expose a conspiracy three hundred years in the making, or become its next casualty, unless she and Chaim are willing to break every rule the Choir has ever written about what a Nightingale's Hymn is allowed to be.

Some songs were never meant to be sung alone.