Story Statement
A woman with no family to return home to takes a chance on life in a different country - but that life only starts IF she can sneak into the royal bridal competition & kill that country's king.
Antagonist
The main antagonist is the Lord of Winter, King Jädrich Femmel III. Lords are god-like beings who bring their gifts of their chosen season to each of the four countries in the Ringlands. One century ago, after a Summer brutal enough to have melted a large chunk of both the Winter King’s lands and his people, who are animated constructs made of ice rather than flesh-and-blood mortals, King Jädrich returned to find the devastation left behind and closed his borders. He’s refused to move ever since, leaving the rest of the seasons stuck in place and stagnant as the endless summer, autumn, winter, and spring rage in their respective lands.
Every foreign messenger and domestic assassin have fallen at the hands of the Winter King, but as he hosts a bridal competition in search of his new queen, the Summer Lord finds the perfect opportunity to sneak a frail, half-Winter woman named Aveline into the country, dressing her as a bride and arming with the tools to kill even a creature made of ice. But while he promises to make Aveline his bride for a job well done, she has no love for the Lord of Summer, nor has she ever even stepped foot in her absent father’s frozen lands. As such, more than the Winter King’s frosty and cruel countenance, Aveline must also survive the culture shock of being surrounded by an entirely new land, with vicious bridal contestants and royal officials scrutinizing every forged detail of her disguise. It’s war on all sides for Aveline, and while she’s desperate to avenge what she’s lost in the century she’s been trapped in Summer, unable to bear the strong sunlight, she’s also desperate to keep herself safe above all others.
Break Out Title
The Glass Witch
The Silverblood Witch
The Half-Sun Sorceress
The Glass Dragon
Genre/Comps:
Fantasy (Adult)
Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik)—a book about a woman’s quest to keep the frost demons at bay as Winter continues to eat away at the country, only to discover that these frost-creatures have been trying to keep another force at bay all along, this story’s themes of Frost and Fire parallel The Glass Witch in its world building and the struggle between supernatural beings that cost innocent lives in the process.
The Winter Witch (Paula Brackston)—a story of a woman who loses her family and is shipped off to be with a man she’s never met while hiding her true nature, this book’s main character likewise must learn to own her power, her being, and use it to make a decision on who and what is worth defending.
A Court of Thorns and Roses (Sarah J. Maas)—a story of a human girl drawn into the world of Fae, where she soon comes to decide who, and more importantly, what, she needs to fight for as the lines between races blur and her loyalties to her family and the human race at large fade. Its enemies-to-lovers subplot also appears in The Glass Witch.
Logline
It’s up to one half-blood woman to stop a century-long disaster caused by one tyrant, immortal king, but as she disguises herself as a potential bride to kill him, she quickly learns that one’s loyalty to their country isn’t determined by blood alone.
Inner Conflict
Aveline’s inner conflict revolves around a choice of identity as she struggles to understand where she falls between her mother’s people and her father’s.
Aveline is not only a lowborn woman, born in a brothel to a community of entertainers and prostitutes, but she’s a woman that most believe shouldn’t even be possible: a cross between the Summer people, her mother one of the great golden dragonfolk of the desert, and the Winter people, her father a man quite literally made of ice. As such, while Aveline is fully flesh, she’s scorned and whispered about in the streets of her home country, and the frosted skin she’s inherited from her father’s people make it so that she can only bear the heat of the Summerlands when Winter comes to weaken the sun’s rays. No Winter for a century meant she couldn’t leave her secluded home in the one snowcapped mountain Summer has.
When the Summer Lord comes to proposition her to take on an assassin’s quest, she comes back to her home city for the first time in a century, only to discover that her only family—her mother—is dead. It’s her urge for revenge against the Winter King that spurs her above all else, but as she goes to live in Winter as a fake bridal contestant to kill King Jädrich, she finds herself realizing that while her mother’s people saw her as a Winter citizen due to her appearance and icy magic, her manners, beliefs, and the very flesh of her body irreconcilably set her apart from the Winter people, leaving her abandoned at a crossroads and struggling to discover where she truly belongs in her world.
Secondary Conflict
Throughout the three-week bridal competition, Aveline encounters setbacks in her plot to kill the king. A previous assassination attempt by another contestant has the king and his castle on high alert for other potential threats, and so Aveline is forced to abandon the weapons she came with and wait on other, more easily disguisable weapons to come from her benefactor. In the meantime, she has to stay in the competition—meaning she has to actually court and intrigue the king enough to make him keep her in the competition.
But where her mother taught her the tricks of the brothel’s prostitutes, she never taught Aveline the art of detachment, and in a place so lonely and hostile as the Winter King’s castle, it’s difficult not to find some solace in testing fate with a man she knows could and would kill her without sparing it a thought. However, it’s not only her loyalties to her mother and her promise for revenge that start slipping under, but her very disposition towards that king as he warms up to her and shows her a side of him she never expected, and she finds her whole quest thrown into jeopardy.
Setting
The book has two main settings: Summer and Winter.
Summer, especially the desert where we first find Aveline, is a land of robust culture: the Summer Lord’s sandstone palace looms over a bustling city, where the smell of spices and tobacco carry on the wind with merchant’s calls, all manner of chattering folk, and street musicians’ songs. But after a hundred years of Summer, the plants are drying up, the desert getting larger, and many of the once vibrant paints on the buildings have been baked away, leaving nothing but tall buildings of sandstone and baked clay. Aveline’s crude cave in the one snowy, but melting mountain is the only place that gives her any solace from the otherwise unbearable heat and sunlight that even the dragonfolk, for all their golden scales and pride in their bright and clear skies, have to hide from to keep from burning in the harsh light.
In contrast, we meet King Jädrich in his castle in Winter, a place that’s long been frozen over to the point of it being impossible for flesh-and-blood beings to live there. No unfrozen water, no need for food outside a special animal that replenishes their magic, no sound but the roar of Winter’s winds and the tap of fine shoes across frozen ground, Winter is a land that, while beautiful like a winter postcard in its glistening, snowy windows and cobblestone streets, its great looming castle and magical silver lights that dance in gleaming lanterns, is little more than a caricature of life. It’s not a dollhouse, but a doll country, a place Aveline finds just as difficult to bear alone as Summer as she struggles to navigate strange customs, bear the freezing cold, and find enough food (while hiding the fact that she needs it at all).
