Veinbound: The Red Bargain

By Anne Pengelly

VEINBOUND
The Red Bargain Trilogy Book One

The blood always remembers who spilled it.

In the world of Elthara, magic is not a gift. It is a transaction. Blood is currency. Debt is doctrine. And the Red Church keeps the ledger.

Nyxa Reddane was raised at the margins, an orphan taught hedge magic by a woman the village tolerated but never trusted. She learned early to stay small, stay quiet, and never draw the eye of a Collector.

Then she saved a life she should have left to the ledger.

Now she is Excommunicate Maleficaria, the highest crime the Church can name. Marked as a heretic. Hunted by Thorns. Her name struck from every record as though she never existed.

But names, like blood, are stubborn things.

Fleeing into a world built on sanctified cruelty, Nyxa finds unlikely shelter with the Bone Choir, underground practitioners who remember what the Church has spent two centuries trying to erase. That magic was never meant to be owned. That the Bargain was a contract, not a covenant. That power extracted by force is not balance.

It is rot.

As the Old God's system begins to fracture and new powers stir at the edges of the world, Nyxa must decide what she is willing to burn, and what she is willing to become, to break a ledger that has never once been balanced in favour of the powerless.

Veinbound is the first book in The Red Bargain series. A grimdark fantasy for readers of Joe Abercrombie, Robin Hobb, and V.E. Schwab.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F3W24GZZ
• ISBN13: 9798316817849
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 566 Pages
• Weight: 1.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.0" x 8.0"