You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO comes from Jeannette, who is looking for this fantasy romance. Content warning for self-harm:
I read this not long ago, within the last year, but I just can’t find it on my Kindle and I want to re-read it and recommend it.
It was a M/M romance in a sword & sorcery setting. It opens with a scholar with a severe case of PTSD (to the point of cutting himself) living alone in a cottage making money doing translations. A captain of the royal guard appears, asking him to come to the castle. Low and behold they had been mutual boyhood crushes. They camp on the way back to the castle and the scholar tells him how his master was possessed and then tortured him.
At the castle the scholar helps talk to a barbarian ghost (inhabiting a necklace?), asking the location of an ancient invasion tunnel. The ghost doesn’t want to help, because his people were wiped out by an epidemic and he had vowed revenge on the ancestors of the present kingdom.
The scholar, the soldier, the king, and an army march to the border. At a tower near the border the kings mages call up the ghost again and the scholar is possessed, as he’s the only one who can understand his language. They go on a ride and spot the coming invasion – the scholar escapes by climbing a cliff using the skills of the ghost. After the battle more magic ensues as they try to remove the ghost from the scholar. Eventually the soldier and the scholar get together and are granted a manor, without a basement, to live in together.
So I remember the whole plot – but no words specific enough to search for it!
I know many of you will want to read this one!
Could it be Kaje Harper’s Nor Iron Bars a Cage? A M/M involving a sorcerer and a man from his past.
That’s it! Thank you so much – you are amazing! I must have gotten it from All romance as it wasn’t in my amazon collection. Good news is that Nor Iron Bars a Cage is free right now on Amazon – I am off to re-read.
Ha! This is the first time I have actually known the answer. 🙂
“free” is exactly the right price for me since I am on a no-spend for books for the rest of the month. This sounds really different and interesting. Thanks for the HaBo and for figuring it out!
Hah, I knew I’d read this! I was thinking Amy Rae Durreson – Lord Heliadore’s Retirement is pretty similar sounding, but no, I remember reading the Kaje Harper too.