She has been in the cell less than a day. Guards are dragging a body back down the tunnel and dumping it on the stone, and the prisoners either side of her are hissing at her to stay quiet and not waste what he did. He went to the tables in her place, a stranger she has exchanged perhaps a hundred words with. So she crawls to the iron between their cages, pushes her hand through into the dark, and leaves it there. Nobody outside this prison has been able to see him, hear him or touch him since before her great-grandparents were born. In the dark, a hand closes around hers and squeezes. Kiss of the Black Flame by Helen Scheuerer spends five hundred pages on what that gesture costs her.
Kiss of the Black Flame Begins in a Cage
The heroine of Kiss of the Black Flame by Helen Scheuerer is Saige Grayson, a mortal bookbinder in Hanniel, thirty-five, six months into running the workshop her late master left her and deeper in debt than she has admitted to anyone who loves her. When the man holding that debt finds a buyer willing to pay double, he takes it, and keeps her aunt and her best friend as insurance.
The buyer wants a bookbinder because he is hunting a damaged volume that records how an immortal race was made, and therefore how it could be unmade. Saige lands instead beside a prisoner of that same tyrant, and something about her presence starts loosening a curse two centuries old. He offers an arrangement: he gets her out and her people back, she finds the volume, repairs it, and brings it to where he lives.
A Bargain Nobody Gets to Leave
The rule Saige was raised on had three clauses, and the last of them was a kiss. Words could be survived. Blood could be survived. A kiss was the one agreement you never entered with an immortal. It is, naturally, the only seal this bargain will accept.
Here is where a group should slow down. From that moment Kiss of the Black Flame by Helen Scheuerer has its heroine tethered by magic to a man she then spends a week on horseback with, and weeks in her own workshop with, and falls for. Whenever the thought of abandoning the deal crosses her mind properly, rings of dark fire tighten on her wrists. She never gets to test what she would feel about him if she were free to go. The novel is honest enough to say so, through friends who have watched her be used before and recognise the shape of it. What it will not do is settle the matter, and that refusal is the best thing on a discussion agenda.
What Kiss of the Black Flame Knows About Pain
Saige has been in agony down one side of her body her whole life, and there has never been a mark for a healer to find. She has been told she wants attention. She has been told she is grieving. And she has bankrupted herself on consultations, and the letters declining to see her again go straight into the waste basket.
Kiss of the Black Flame by Helen Scheuerer writes this from the inside. Saige keeps a private scale and reports the number to nobody. She knows when her supply runs out and how far she can stretch it. She has a cloth of peppermint oil for the first stage and a routine of naming what she can hear and smell for the second, and when both give out she hurts herself elsewhere on purpose to give the pain a rival, having already talked herself off worse habits. The moment somebody says plainly that he believes her is the strongest scene in the book, and it lands well before either of them mentions love.
The Consortium of Difficult Women
The other reason to bring this to a group is that the immortal is not the one who rescues Saige. Her aunt Yevna runs a tavern, distils illegal gin and calls her wolfhound her son. Raven is a metalworker whose employer takes credit for her work, and who meets a crisis by tracking down the one piece of equipment Saige needs and making her name a happy memory before she walks into a hostile room. Between them they have spent years running a mutual-aid network among the tradeswomen of the city, and it sources impossible tools, spreads false sightings to throw hunters off, and keeps an abandoned shop trading while its owner is missing.
That network achieves more than any magic in Kiss of the Black Flame by Helen Scheuerer, and it is drawn with affection and no sugar. The dedication is addressed to women who refuse to disappear. These are the women it means.
Where Kiss of the Black Flame Overstays
- The middle sags. A long journey followed by a long domestic stretch, both running the same exchange: she needles him, he retreats, an apology follows. A group will start skimming by the halfway mark.
- He is withholding, and the book has no good reason for it. Something significant is kept back far past the point where concealment makes sense, and the reckoning afterwards is over almost at once.
- The brothers are sketches. Two siblings arrive carrying centuries of history and get a line of banter each.
- The debt collector and his enforcer are pantomime, in a novel otherwise sharp about how men make women smaller in ordinary ways.
- The world is explained in question and answer. One character asks, the other lectures. The book even formalises it as a deal.
- Check the content first. Torture recalled in detail, including branding and wounds kept deliberately open. People burned alive. Chronic illness, and self-injury used to manage it. Being disbelieved by doctors. Sex traded to settle a debt, a controlling former partner, slurs. Captivity. Thoughts of ending one’s own life, and a request made of somebody else. A child caught in a fire. Consent removed by magic. The second half is far more explicit than the first, with dominance elements.
Where Kiss of the Black Flame by Helen Scheuerer earns its bulk is in two long restoration sequences, the ruined volume in its cradle and Saige working over it: unpicking old stitching, flattening warped folds, testing whether the paper was cut with the grain or against it. Her hands are the most convincing thing on the page, and the romance grows from a man watching an expert and being allowed to pass her what she asks for. Her craft also takes the pair into a forest ringed with red toadstools, where the folklore the characters trade about a fairy ring badly understates the toll.
For the Group
- The tether. She says she trusts him. She also cannot leave. Are those compatible? Does the book think so?
- Forgiveness on a schedule. Saige absolves a serious deception very fast. Generosity, or a lifetime of making herself easy to be around?
- Being believed. Most groups will know somebody told their pain is imaginary. What does the novel think belief is worth?
- The name on his back. The flowers inked over his scars are all plants that grow where nothing should. Discuss what the last of them turns out to be.
- The final two pages. Nobody reaches for a coat until this is talked through.
Groups who finish Kiss of the Black Flame by Helen Scheuerer and want more of the same hand should try Thorns & Fire, which is leaner and better behaved. For another argument about a deal signed under duress, The Rose Bargain by Sasha Peyton Smith is the closest match, while Immortal Game by Allison Saft covers the ground in half the pages. The Lion and the Deathless Dark by Carissa Broadbent handles the doomed immortal with more restraint, and Winterveil by Ava Reid is the colder alternative for anyone who found this too warm.
Where It Leaves You
Scheuerer has said this was the book she wrote for herself after years of working at somebody else’s pace, and that her rule was that it would take as long as it took. Both halves of that are visible. The indulgence is on the page, and so is the care.
What a group will still be circling an hour later is the last exchange, which turns on a phrase from the original agreement that everybody had heard and nobody had examined. Kiss of the Black Flame by Helen Scheuerer closes by asking its heroine to reread the small print of her own life. She does, and what she finds there is not heartbreak. It is a plan.
