She has carried mercy for ten thousand years. She has never broken a rule. Until Hever.
In the summer of 1528, the sweating sickness reaches Kent. Death walks up the avenue at Hever Castle in the dusk to claim the woman who will one day be Queen of England.
She does not.
What Death does instead is stay at Anne Boleyn's bedside until the fever breaks — and the rule she has held since before the Romans goes cold against her finger. She enters Anne's household as Mistress Morgana Carey. A quiet Welsh widow with auburn hair and storm-grey eyes. An iron ring she never removes.
She does not yet know that two of the only beings older than herself are about to find her at court.
The first is a one-eyed courtier called the Vicar of Hell. He recognizes her the moment she crosses the great hall at Greenwich. He is not what the court has named him. He has loved her since the Black Death, and he has wanted, for most of those years, to ease the weight of what she carries.
The second is a quiet scholar at Cambridge who does not know what is moving through him when he prays. He writes her letters from across the sea. She reads them by candlelight and cannot move for an hour after.
Eight years stand between the fevered chamber at Hever and the scaffold at Tower Green. Between them is a queen Death is not allowed to love, a king whose church is breaking, and a woman who has held the world's mercy for ten thousand years and is about to learn she has been allowed to set it down all along.
She has to choose. The wrong one will end her. So will the right one.
The Sweating Year is Book One of The Hollow Crown, a sacramental historical fantasy romance duology from the author of Bone Covenant.
Genre: Historical Romance
In the summer of 1528, the sweating sickness reaches Kent. Death walks up the avenue at Hever Castle in the dusk to claim the woman who will one day be Queen of England.
She does not.
What Death does instead is stay at Anne Boleyn's bedside until the fever breaks — and the rule she has held since before the Romans goes cold against her finger. She enters Anne's household as Mistress Morgana Carey. A quiet Welsh widow with auburn hair and storm-grey eyes. An iron ring she never removes.
She does not yet know that two of the only beings older than herself are about to find her at court.
The first is a one-eyed courtier called the Vicar of Hell. He recognizes her the moment she crosses the great hall at Greenwich. He is not what the court has named him. He has loved her since the Black Death, and he has wanted, for most of those years, to ease the weight of what she carries.
The second is a quiet scholar at Cambridge who does not know what is moving through him when he prays. He writes her letters from across the sea. She reads them by candlelight and cannot move for an hour after.
Eight years stand between the fevered chamber at Hever and the scaffold at Tower Green. Between them is a queen Death is not allowed to love, a king whose church is breaking, and a woman who has held the world's mercy for ten thousand years and is about to learn she has been allowed to set it down all along.
She has to choose. The wrong one will end her. So will the right one.
The Sweating Year is Book One of The Hollow Crown, a sacramental historical fantasy romance duology from the author of Bone Covenant.
Genre: Historical Romance
Used availability for Kate Seger's The Sweating Year