Stella is a duchess who gets cut down in public by her own sister Grace. She opens her eyes on the morning of the royal selection hunt, the same day she died the first time. Power games killed her once, so she skips the princes entirely and picks Clovis, a quiet hunter with a small cottage and no court manners.
Her father answers by dragging her over crushed rose thorns and stripping her name. Stella builds a plain life anyway, unaware the Dowager Queen is testing her in secret and that Clovis wears a crown he never mentions. When Grace and Peter poison the queen and pin it on Stella, the gallows become the stage for every hidden thing at once.
