The Poison Oath

By Sarah McCarthy

Aurielle Veridane spent twenty years failing at a magic that was never real.

Nobody told her. Not her teachers. Not the six First Families who sat on their thrones and voted on whether she should be executed for failing her trial. And not her mother, who runs the Arcanum and let her daughter believe the fault was hers.

Two months out, Aurielle lives in a shed on the beach below the cliff, fishing badly and collecting glass leaves she keeps meaning to turn into lanterns. It is cold and it is hers and she will take it.

Then someone leaves a sheaf of blood-soaked pages in her bag, torn from the diary of the rider she was raised to marry. Jeren Valmont is dead. Officially, nobody is looking into it.

Going back up means the elevator, the parties, the poison oath every rider swears and the monthly antidote that keeps them all obedient. It means her mother. And it means finding out what that woman did to her when she was a child, and what it has been doing to her ever since.

There are hours Aurielle cannot account for. There is a man bleeding on a garden path and a room full of people pointing at her. There are two dragons circling the cliff who will not say what they want with her. She went back to find out who killed Jeren. She is starting to worry she already knows.

The Poison Oath is the first book in a new dragon fantasy series. A murder mystery with dragons, a wry and disastrous heroine, and a magical order built on a very old lie. No spice.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GVSZZ49Q
• ISBN13: 9798254369684
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 346 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"