The Surveyor and the Stone Prince

She is the last person alive who remembers her country's border. He is the prince who helped take it. The Queen has just married them to each other.

In Hallorn, a border stone holds only as long as somebody cannot forget what happened to them beside it. The kingdom has always made sure of that with a rod and a seven-year-old. Twenty-two years ago it took its neighbor's valleys more gently: nine days of feasting at the gate, with poppy in the wine, until a whole people could no longer remember where their country was.

Loveday Trevose was eleven, at the children's table, where nobody thought to look at what the children drank. She has said those nine days over every night since. She is thirty-three now, she settles hedge disputes in a market town, and she is the only reason the gate-stone still stands.

Prince Roland was eighteen, and he poured. He is forty, Warden of everything that was taken, and he told her what he was before he let her marry him. He has not told her all of it.

Now the new border is failing. Unless thirty-three stones wake before spring, the kingdom goes back to the rod, with five hundred children. The only other way is the old Vessan one: two people walk the line and make something worth remembering at every stone. So there is one tent with a blanket hung down the middle, a company of soldiers laying bets on the blanket, an auditor who writes everything down, and a gander. The first stone to ring rings because she hits him.

Loveday did not marry him to fall in love. She married him because a woman who holds a kingdom's gate has something to bargain with, and she means to spend it.

A complete standalone romantasy: a slow-burn marriage of convenience between two grown people, with a dry sense of humor, a found family on the road, open-door love scenes in the second half, and a happy ending that pays what it owes.