Quarterly book box
La Reina
We like our heroines formidable and our heroes a little unconventional.
Publisher’s Exclusive Blurb
She thinks his eyes are silver.
They are not. But she has only ever seen him in the cold and dark of the dungeon, behind iron bars and silver restraints. She has never seen what they look like when he is safe. When he is warm. When he is not afraid.
The kingdom's magic holds as long as he bleeds in chains. He wonders if this will end someday when he can endure no longer, wonders if he will get to go home then. See the sky, the stars even.
But had he not walked into it himself? Not for the crown, never for the crown, but for the woman who walks past his cage every morning without knowing his name. Without remembering that she once knew it.
He cannot tell her. The silver in his throat coils beneath the collar that keeps it in place. So he watches instead.
Six winters have made him quiet. They have taught him not to expect kindness, not to reach for what no one would remember. And still, when she comes close, he turns towards her warmth.
He watches her pass his cage, cold and guarded, her expression emptied of anything that might betray emotion. And yet she always stops. She cannot seem to help herself. No matter how little time she has, no matter how firmly she tells herself to keep walking, she pauses whenever she sees him.
She tells herself it is scholarly habit. Observation. The detached mercy of someone who simply cannot walk past a suffering thing without pausing. Because that is what he is, she thinks—a suffering thing. Rare and ruined. The last of his kind, pale-haired and hollow-eyed, so beautiful it registers almost as wrongness, the way a bird with a broken wing might be beautiful. Something that should exist in starlight, in warmth, now taught to flinch at the touch of iron.
She does not examine why she stays longer than she should. Not when she knows better than to grow attached to something she cannot save. Nor does she examine the specific quality of his stillness when she is near, or why something in her chest aches when he curls towards her, so readily, so instinctively, like a creature that has never quite learnt to stop trusting warmth.
She only notices, one evening, when the firelight catches his face and his eyes finally close in sleep, that they are not silver at all.
They are gold.
What is La Espectadora?
A quarterly box featuring a luxe special edition of a new release, complete with exclusive hardcover design/artwork, different endpaper arts, foil stamping on hardcover, sprayed edges, and bound-in vellum overlays.
Our La Reina picks feature female protagonists IN POWER in a fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian or contemporary setting.
A little power imbalance is fine, so long as it's tilted in HER favour.