Heartsgrove

In this queer folkloric romance, a world-weary botanist seeks a dying dryad prince to help untangle the curse transforming his body, set in the same world as A Dark and Drowning Tide. In the wake of a disastrous scientific expedition, life has gone on for all the surviving members—save for one. Ludwig von Meyer, renowned botanist and victim of a deadly curse, is slowly turning into a tree. His body grows more alien by the day, and then there’s the matter of the blackouts, which have him waking inside an eerie, blighted grove. Then, one night, he awakes on the doorstep of the grove’s keeper, a mysterious dryad prince named Alois, who offers a pact. Alois can lift Ludwig’s curse, on one condition: Ludwig must rid the sacred grove of its blight. With the bargain sealed, Ludwig has only a handful of weeks to solve the mystery of the grove before his curse makes him a permanent part of it . . . and before the handsome dryad who increasingly owns Ludwig’s heart perishes along with his trees.