The Practice of Devotion (Paperback)

Paperback. Liora Venn knows the body speaks before the heart admits what has changed.At the forest edge of Velkyn's Hollow, she tends wounds, fevers, and grief with steady hands and careful distance. She trusts signs she can measure: breath, pulse, blood, heat. Magic belongs to council chambers and public rites. Healing belongs to the work done quietly after everyone else has gone home.Then Ronan Thale carries a wounded man through her door in the middle of a storm.The blacksmith is steady where others would panic, useful where others would hover, and far too careful with the space Liora tries to keep between them. When warmth begins answering in the places their hands nearly touch, she tells herself it is proximity. Curiosity. A reaction that can be named if she studies it long enough.But the thread does not fade when Ronan leaves.As the bond between them grows through restraint, return, and the kind of care that asks for nothing before giving everything, Liora is forced to face a truth no ledger can easily hold. Some recognitions do not arrive in spectacle. Some are built in the waiting, the staying, the quiet devotion of a person who chooses you again before anyone calls it love. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…