The Beloved Gardener of the World Tree

Lilith La Noella has a distinct advantage over everyone else in her new life: she has already read the book that contains her tragic fate. Armed with the knowledge that her fiancé, the formidable Duke Edrion La Arkshad, will be the catalyst of her demise, she crafts a foolproof plan for survival. Her solution is to embrace obscurity, taking up the disrespected profession of a horticulturist and fleeing to the rural South. In the quiet isolation of the provinces, surrounded by soil and seedlings, she believes she has finally outrun the narrative destined to destroy her. However, safety proves to be an illusion when a royal summons from the empress arrives. Lilith is dragged back to the capital and handed an impossible ultimatum: she must coax the legendary, barren World Tree into bloom. Failure will not only seal her own doom but will condemn her entire family to execution. Trapped between a tyrannical monarch and the fiancé she so desperately fears, Lilith finds that escaping her story is not as easy as changing her address. As she wrestles with the ancient magic of the tree and the dangerous pull of the Duke’s attention, she must uncover whether she can truly alter the course of destiny—or if her efforts will merely cultivate a different, and perhaps deeper, tragedy.