Vows of Blood and Deception by Aria Ashbrook: Chapter-by-Chapter Book Summary

This Vows of Blood and Deception book summary covers Aria Ashbrook’s The Hirathean Path Book 2. Whether you need a full recap before picking up Blood of Truth and Traitors or just want a refresher on what happened, this chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Vows of Blood and Deception has you covered. The summary of Vows of Blood and Deception below includes full spoilers.

VOWS OF BLOOD AND DECEPTION TROPES: Dangerous Journey | Found Family | Second Chance Romance | Slow Burn | Touch Her and Die

Jump to Chapter Recap of Vows of Blood and Deception: 11–20 | 21–30 | 31–40 | 41–50 | 51–60 // The Hirathean Path Book 1 Summary

Vows of Blood and Deception Book Summary

This Aria Ashbrook Vows of Blood and Deception book summary contains full spoilers for all 60 chapters.

Vows of Blood and Deception Chapter 1

Rose Kultavaris walks out of the ball thrown in her honor after winning the Retterheld. Her magic, title, and fortune have all been given back to her, but she feels hollow. Kyor has left her, Kay is furious with her, and Llin is dead.

A palace housemaid named Summer catches up with Rose on the way to the courtiers’ arc. The priestesses sent Summer to serve Rose, and she has brought back Rose’s belongings from the trials.

When Rose reaches her childhood home, it’s dark and clearly hasn’t been lived in for years. A key appears near the door, and Rose lets herself in. She uses her magic to bring the dying kitchen plants back to life, and she and Summer set about figuring out how to make the place livable.

Then the doorbell rings. Summer tries to send the visitor away, but it’s Jonas, and he refuses to go until he speaks to Rose. Rose lets him in.

Jonas tells her that the Goddess Etta pulled him aside privately while Rose was being taken to the Spire during the trials. He has been struggling to find the words, but he finally tells her that William, the boy Jonas’s father took in as a ward, is actually her brother Florian, whom she believed had been murdered.

Vows of Blood and Deception Chapter 2

Jonas tells Rose that her brother Florian never died. The king’s order was never carried out, and Florian has been living under the name William all along. Rose rejects the claim at first, but the realization eventually destroys her. Her family spent years mourning a brother who was still breathing, and her father drank himself into an early grave over a loss that never happened.

Then it hits Rose that Jonas has known the truth for years. Her rage triggers her uncontrolled ice magic, which begins pulling the air from Jonas’s lungs without her even meaning to. Summer bursts in with a saucepan, startling Rose and breaking the magic’s hold on Jonas. Rose sends Summer away and refuses her offer of a tonic that would make Summer forget what she witnessed.

Rose forces Jonas to explain how Florian survived. He tells her that someone concealed Florian as an infant before the execution could happen, and Artur eventually brought him into his household as William. Jonas himself only pieced it together when he was fifteen or sixteen.

Then Rose tells Jonas that Artur intends to marry Kay. Jonas concludes that Kay must be pregnant with Hew‘s child and heads back to the ball to stop the marriage. Rose refuses to go with him because of her falling out with Kyor.

Once Rose is alone, she realizes that the truth would put William in danger. William can never know who she is to him.

Vows of Blood and Deception Chapter 3

Rose returns to her childhood bedroom, which Summer has already prepared. Summer even left her soup. Summer then helps Rose out of the ballgown, and Rose goes to sleep alone, grieving Kyor.

The next morning, Rose loses control of her ice magic and cracks the bedroom wall. She hides the damage with ivy and tells Summer she was training. Then Rose actually trains to steady herself.

At breakfast, Rose finds out that Kay never came home. When the doorbell rings, Rose runs to answer it, certain it must be Kay. Instead, it’s Benny, the Earl of the Eastern Isles, stopping by before he sails home.

Rose and Benny eat together. Rose tells him she and Kyor are finished and nearly lets slip that William is alive before catching herself. She does confide that her ice magic never went away and that she accidentally used it on Jonas. Benny suggests that Rose return to the Isles with him. Rose declines..

The doorbell rings again. Summer brings a message from an unnamed visitor who said he hoped Rose hadn’t been too cold without him. Rose knows immediately who the visitor is and runs to the door to find Ruben, her old friend from the slums, grinning at her.

Vows of Blood and Deception Chapter 4

Rose reunites with Ruben, who staked everything he owned on her winning the competition. He placed his winnings on Rose after each successive trial and used the final payout to buy his way out of the slums and into the third ring.

Ruben then gets to the real reason he came. His mother Noleen has taken a serious turn for the worse, and the healers Ruben consulted have nothing left to offer. Knowing Rose has just regained her magic and that her mother was a gifted healer, he asks Rose to try.

Rose agrees and takes Ruben to her mother’s orangery, where certain plants appear to glow. She gathers what she needs into a basket, along with a few of her mother’s old notebooks, a knife, and a mortar and pestle.

Before Rose and Ruben leave, Rose convinces Benny to stay at the house rather than move to an inn so she can spend as much time with him as possible before he has to go.

On the carriage ride to Ruben’s new home in the third ring, Rose fills him in on everything that happened during the Retterheld. They arrive to find the house warm and welcoming, and Ruben calls ahead to let Noleen know he has brought someone to see her.

Vows of Blood and Deception Chapter 5

Rose arrives at Ruben’s house to find his mother in a bad way, very frail and barely able to hold a conversation. Rose decides the best thing she can do is prepare a healing tonic and gets to work in the kitchen, using her plant magic to draw sap from hyssop and purslane seeds.

While the tonic steeps, Rose goes to examine Noleen directly, wondering whether Rose might have inherited some of her mother’s healing abilities. She holds her hands close to Noleen and reaches out with her magic, hoping to find something she can work with. There’s nothing there. Noleen’s magic has vanished entirely, and Rose has to break the news to Ruben.

Vows of Blood and Deception Chapter 6

Rose notices that Noleen’s body feels completely empty of magic, which should be impossible since magic only departs at the moment of death. She mentions it to Ruben but tells him she was probably reading Noleen’s condition wrong. Rose doesn’t believe that herself. Before leaving, she prepares a tonic that at least eases the pain, though she knows she hasn’t gotten anywhere near the root of Noleen’s problem.

Back home, Benny is there, but Kay still hasn’t shown up. Then Kay finally arrives at the door with Jonas, and Rose sees right away that Kay is wearing three rings across her fingers. In Morathka, that means marriage. Kay and Jonas have married in secret, without a word to anyone.

Rose is blindsided. Her emotions push her magic over the edge, icing over the windows, and she briefly separates from her body, soaring above the city before snapping back to herself on the sofa. Kay notices that Rose’s eyes had gone white and immediately grows suspicious.

Benny steps in before the situation deteriorates further. He sends Jonas away for the night and tells Kay plainly that Kay isn’t leaving. Kay retreats upstairs to bed, and Rose and Benny are left alone in the silence.

Vows of Blood and Deception Chapter 7

Benny brings Rose food and notices a crack in the wall caused by Rose’s uncontrolled magic. Rose brushes it off, but Benny sees through it and reminds her he’s there if she needs to talk.

Rose sleeps badly and wakes at dawn to find the kitchen table loaded with gift hampers from court lords and ladies. The gesture strikes her as hollow, and she tells Summer to distribute everything among Summer’s friends in other households.

When Jonas arrives, Rose confronts Jonas and Kay in the drawing room. Kay is unapologetic, arguing that the marriage gives her security and the future she wants. Rose says she went through the Retterheld so Kay could have real freedom, including the choice to marry for love.

Rose then asks Jonas who knows about the marriage. He says his father hasn’t been told, and William noticed something was off at breakfast but accepted a vague excuse. When Rose mentions that William is actually their brother Florian, Kay reveals that she already knew. Rose loses her composure and tells Kay that their father drank himself to death grieving a son who’d been alive in the High Hold the whole time.

Suddenly, the window tears free from the wall. William stands on the other side. He heard everything, and he asks, barely above a whisper, whether Rose is really his sister.

Vows of Blood and Deception Chapter 8

Kay brings William inside rather than risk him wandering off with unanswered questions. William had followed Jonas out of worry and heard enough to learn who he really is. He turns to Rose and asks whether they would’ve ever told him on their own. Rose privately knows she wouldn’t have.

William struggles to absorb the idea that everything he believed about himself was false. He mentions a rumor he’d heard that their mother had let the queen die out of ambition, and Rose firmly denies the claim. She then tells William what little she knows about how he survived the king’s death order and ended up with Artur, and she warns him that his survival now puts him in danger.

Then William asks Jonas how long he’s known. Jonas admits he’s known since his own teenage years. William then asks Jonas to leave because he wants to talk to his sisters alone.

Once Jonas is gone, William apologizes for the broken window. He admits that Artur’s story never fully added up for him, but the one time William questioned it as a child, Artur’s reaction was enough to stop him from asking again. He’d long assumed he was probably Artur’s illegitimate son.

Rose tells William he can’t let Artur know, at least not yet, and suggests that William spend a few days with trusted friends. William agrees. He asks about the ice magic he saw Rose use. Rose admits she doesn’t fully understand it but intends to find out.

Vows of Blood and Deception Chapter 9

William takes Jonas with him to collect his belongings, leaving Rose to spend the day alone with Kay. Rather than reconnect with her sister, Rose goes straight to the family library to dig through the restricted books her parents had always kept off-limits, in search of answers about her ice powers. 

Benny arrives and takes over most of the reading since his ability to cut to the truth of things makes him far faster and more reliable than Rose. After hours of searching, Rose and Benny come up empty, though one book contains a blood vow ritual that Rose finds herself returning to in her thoughts, half-tempted to use it to keep both Jonas and Kay quiet.

Kay keeps her distance for the rest of the day and makes no attempt to talk. That night, Rose slips into her sister’s room and watches her sleep. Seeing Kay safe and unguarded pushes Rose toward a decision she’s been avoiding.

The following morning, Rose goes to Etta’s temple in the third district to find Dinah, the priestess who raised her mother. In a warded courtyard that conceals Rose and Dinah from outside view, Rose finally admits what she’s carried since the Retterheld. She came back from one of its trials with ice powers she was never supposed to have.

Vows of Blood and Deception Chapter 10

Rose shares her dangerous secret with Dinah and braces for shock or rejection. She gets neither. Instead, Dinah tells Rose they need to talk about her mother.

Dinah says that Rose’s mother wasn’t brought to the temple as an infant but as a child, old enough to carry fragments of memory that Rose’s mother found deeply unsettling. Those memories frightened Rose’s mother so much that she repeatedly chose to erase them with gladden root, and each time the priestesses told her what she’d forgotten, she chose to forget it all over again.

From there, Dinah confirms what Rose has started to suspect. Her ice powers were always part of her heritage, not a gift from the spirits of Follen Lake, and they can’t be pushed back down. The temple has no way to teach her control. Her only real option is to seek out the Issen, the people who naturally wield that kind of power, and hope the Issen will help rather than harm her.

Dinah brings up the dagger she gave Rose, a dagger that once belonged to Rose’s mother. Dinah says it’s one of three linked blades. She tells Rose that the bond with the weapon might give Rose a way in with the Issen where words alone would fail. Rose asks whether her siblings carry the same power. Dinah confirms they do without stating it outright.

Outside the temple, Rose walks into a procession. Noleen, Ruben’s dying mother, is inside the carriage. Rose finds Ruben following it, barely holding himself upright. She talks him into coming back to the High Hold with her, and they stand together until Noleen disappears behind the temple doors. Only then does Ruben fall apart.