YA fantasy novel that has a very pale blue cover with a dark haired woman on it

This feels so vague and I can't remember many details but this novel feels SO distinct.

Ok, so, I read this between 2017-2019. It was distinctive to me because it was about a harem but it wasn't romanticized at all. The ruler was quite abusive, and the story was told from the perspectives of the various women in his 'harem.' The setting is also hard to pin down, but I would say vaguely Turkic/Mongolian/elements of East Asia? The women weren't allowed to leave the palace, which was some sort of forbidden city set-up. It was very low magic but had some magic, and iirc it was mostly about court intrigue and the women supporting each other. I think it ended with some sort of war or conflict and then they were all free and had to think about rebuilding their lives. I want to say it's a duology, and the title was a name (either a place name or a name of a woman). It just felt so dark and mature to me and not in an edgy way either. I remember one of the women talked about the grief she felt when her mother-in-law essentially kidnapped her son to raise him as her own.

I feel like this could have been a translated novel? It's hard to explain, but something about even the writing did not feel at all like the conventions of English-language YA, although I could be wrong.

I've considered that I was a precocious teen reading adult fantasy, but I vaguely remember finding both this book and the presumed other in the duology in the YA section of my library and they were both marked YA. This is driving me sooo crazy.