A Dawn of Onyx

A Dawn of Onyx is the first novel of Kate Golden's Sacred Stones series, published in 2022 and later picked up for wider release by Penguin and Quercus. It is a fantasy romance set on a continent divided between kingdoms, in which the Onyx Kingdom is the most feared power, magic is a rarity worth going to war over, and a healer of Arwen's kind is a strategic asset rather than a person.

Arwen Valondale offers herself up to save her brother, which ends with her a prisoner of the Onyx Kingdom. The king wants her rare magic put to work healing his soldiers, and Arwen can do it, which is precisely why she does not want to. Being able to heal the enemy's army is a service she would rather not provide, and the king is not the sort of employer who accepts a refusal.

Getting out means crossing the woods around the castle, which nobody sensible enters alone. Her best option is another prisoner who is clever, infuriating and very good at finding the things that frighten her, and the two of them have to work out how much of the other's story is true before they trust it. The book sets its politics around a captive healer, a kingdom that runs on war and a power inside Arwen that has not woken up yet.

The series continues in A Promise of Peridot and A Reign of Rose, which follow the same leads and the same war. The first novel establishes the kingdoms, the Onyx King and the magic Arwen has been hiding, and it is written as the opening of a series rather than a standalone, with each volume taking the same conflict further.