Book Two in The Hollow Crown series.New readers should start with The Sweating Year.
For five years, Mistress Carey has served in Anne Boleyn's household — close enough to know the queen's laugh, her temper, and the way she plays a losing hand like it's already won. What Anne doesn't know is what Mistress Carey really is: not a Carey widow at all, but Morgana, the oldest attendant death has ever kept, and the only creature in England who can feel the old debt leaning against the threshold of Anne's life.
For the first time in two centuries of watching debts come due, Morgana faces one she might actually be able to stop.
She keeps her old office through childbed and coronation, through a marriage the whole realm watches curdle in public, into a spring of arrests and trials England will not survive unmarked: to attend, to witness, to carry what the dying leave behind. But as Anne's account comes due, Morgana must answer a harder question than the one that broke her the first time — not what it costs to love someone she isn't permitted to save, but what it costs to love someone she is.
The Quickening Year is a gothic historical fantasy of grief, devotion, and the Tudor court's most famous doomed queen, for readers who have never once found a graveyard less interesting than a garden.
Contains on-page depictions of execution and historical grief. See the book's content note for full detail.
Genre: Fantasy
For five years, Mistress Carey has served in Anne Boleyn's household — close enough to know the queen's laugh, her temper, and the way she plays a losing hand like it's already won. What Anne doesn't know is what Mistress Carey really is: not a Carey widow at all, but Morgana, the oldest attendant death has ever kept, and the only creature in England who can feel the old debt leaning against the threshold of Anne's life.
For the first time in two centuries of watching debts come due, Morgana faces one she might actually be able to stop.
She keeps her old office through childbed and coronation, through a marriage the whole realm watches curdle in public, into a spring of arrests and trials England will not survive unmarked: to attend, to witness, to carry what the dying leave behind. But as Anne's account comes due, Morgana must answer a harder question than the one that broke her the first time — not what it costs to love someone she isn't permitted to save, but what it costs to love someone she is.
The Quickening Year is a gothic historical fantasy of grief, devotion, and the Tudor court's most famous doomed queen, for readers who have never once found a graveyard less interesting than a garden.
Contains on-page depictions of execution and historical grief. See the book's content note for full detail.
Genre: Fantasy
Used availability for Kate Seger's The Quickening Year