The Poisoned Pedestal
By @john1208
At the grand engagement banquet of the Fashar estate, Nisari springs her trap. Armed with memories of her past life, she publicly seduces Omariyan, the brilliant scholar destined to become Prime Minister, leaving her cousin Tazien to be wed to Kadaar - a penniless, disgraced farmer dying of a notorious blood-rot. What Nisari doesn’t realize is that Tazien possesses a sharp, ruthless mind. Tazien knows the Prime Minister's seat is a gilded cage designed by a paranoid Emperor to eventually scapegoat and execute his most powerful scholars. Unbothered by the humiliation, Tazien ships off to the barren steppes with her new husband. Told in alternating perspectives between the coldly calculating Tazien and the fiercely untamed Kadaar, the story follows a bitter rivalry of wills. Kadaar loathes nobles and fights her at every turn in their dilapidated farmhouse. But as Tazien uses her forbidden medical arts to purge the terminal rot from his veins, their enmity turns into a dangerous, unstoppable alliance. Kadaar's agricultural empire soon chokes the capital's supply lines, while Nisari's stolen marriage crumbles when Omariyan realizes her manipulative deceit and divorces her. As the Emperor prepares his execution block for the capital's elite, who will truly hold the empire's throat?
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