Hearthlight Inn has a hearth spirit, a hearthkeeper, a cook, a stablemaster, and a healer — and exactly zero performers, until a woman named Raenisa loses her stage and her dock access to the same company that's been quietly buying up Whiteport one business at a time.

Raenisa doesn't want rescuing any more than anyone else who's joined this household did. She wants creative control: a room where she performs on her own terms instead of whatever a manager or patron decided was profitable that season. What she gets, once Edric shows up with the same offer he's made four times now — a trade, not a rescue — is an old grain barn at the edge of Hearthlight's yard and a household determined to turn it into exactly that room.

Building it should be the easy part. Raenisa is harder to reach than the barn is to renovate — she's spent her whole career being whoever an audience needed, and the household keeps catching glimpses of someone real underneath the performance before she catches herself and turns the lights back on. Ash, meanwhile, has discovered a woman who addresses a centuries-old hearth spirit with actual reverence, and it has gone directly, unapologetically to his head.

The company that keeps showing up wherever this household plants something new has never once needed force. It's patient, polite, and apparently done being subtle — and this time, it isn't just asking for one woman's dock.

In this book

• A performer who's never shown anyone her real face, on purpose
• A hearth spirit thoroughly spoiled by his first real fan
• A fifth hearth-bond forming, one stubborn refusal to be rescued at a time
• A company whose patience is finally running out