Six Scorched Roses

A dying woman walks up to a vampire's castle and offers him a trade, because the alternative is watching her sister go the way the rest of the town has gone.

What is being traded is stated in the title and the title is the structure. Six roses, six vials of blood, six visits, and a novella built as a countdown that the reader can hold in one hand. Broadbent has fewer than two hundred pages and spends none of them on preamble.

Brevity is the constraint and the constraint decides everything. Two hundred pages cannot afford a misunderstanding plot, cannot carry a rival, and have no room for a third-act separation, so the whole thing has to run on two people in a room getting incrementally less careful with each other. Either that is enough or it is not, and there is no subplot standing by to cover the gap.

Six visits is a countdown and countdowns compress. Each meeting has to move the research, move the relationship and deliver a piece of the world, so nothing here is allowed to be idle, and the pressure that produces is the novella's best quality. It also means the middle visits carry more freight than a scene that size can comfortably hold.

Lilith is a scientist and the book is unembarrassed about it. Counting and recording are how she copes. A plague is a problem with an answer rather than a judgement to be endured, and her refusal to be frightened in the correct order is what makes a vampire pay attention to her.

Vale has been alone long enough that being studied is the most interest anyone has shown him in a very long time. Broadbent writes his loneliness through what he does with the roses rather than through what he says, which is the right instinct in a book this short.

The illness is a god's work and that changes what the story is. A town loses divine favour, a man curses the god who abandoned them, and the wasting that follows is a punishment rather than a pathogen. Lilith is trying to cure theology with laboratory method, and the book knows exactly how audacious that is.

Bargain romance usually runs on the threat inside the deal. This one runs on the deal becoming beside the point, and the shift is handled by having neither of them mention it, which is a harder trick than dramatising a confession.

Novellas in a fantasy series are usually cheap. Advertisements for the main sequence, staffed by second-tier characters, published to fill a gap between volumes. This one has its own argument, its own leads and a shape the main books do not have room for.

Adcova is drawn in about six sentences and holds up. A town under a slow curse, neighbours dying at a predictable rate, and a population that has already done its grieving and is now simply waiting. Economy of that order is a novella skill and Broadbent has it.

The romance ends up sweeter than the premise promises and that is the surprise. A story about a plague, a curse and a monster turns out to be about two isolated people finding somebody who will read their notes, and the tenderness is earned by how little of it is stated.

Six roses. She counts them out, and the counting is the whole courtship.