Quicksilver

Quicksilver is the first novel of the Fae & Alchemy series by the British author Callie Hart, published in 2024. Grand Central Publishing and Hodder & Stoughton are among its publishers. A film adaptation with Netflix was announced. It is Hart's best-known work and the opening volume of a series rather than a standalone novel.

The narrator is Saeris Fane, a thief who makes her living by stealing from the reservoirs of the Undying Queen while keeping her own powers out of sight. In the middle of one of those jobs she meets Death, and that meeting reopens a gateway between realms. Saeris falls through it into a country of ice and snow, where the fae turn out to be real and where she is the first human to arrive in a thousand years. Both the realm she leaves and the one she lands in are built on shortages that somebody else controls.

Arriving there leaves her with a problem she did not choose. Saeris accidentally binds herself to Kingfisher, a warrior with his own plans for the alchemy she carries and a pressing need for the magic she has. He wants her power to protect his people, and what the arrangement costs her is not something he spends much time weighing. What begins as a bargain between a mortal thief and an immortal soldier becomes the axis the rest of the book turns on.

The first novel sets out the mortal realm Saeris comes from, the frozen one she falls into, and the two leads who end up on opposite sides of the same agreement. Further Fae & Alchemy books followed in the same world. It belongs to fantasy romance, and it places that romance inside a conflict over magic that neither realm can settle on its own.