Yorkshire · 1812
The Story
Yorkshire, 1812. Lucien Varenne arrives in England posing as a French émigré. In truth, he is a three-thousand-year-old enforcer for the Crimson Court, sent to locate and assess the last surviving descendant of an ancient witch bloodline.
He finds Eliza Caven. Twenty-seven years old, a practical village governess, and a woman who sees the world with unnerving clarity. As they walk the frost-bitten moors, Lucien realises Eliza is not a threat to be managed, but the key to a forgotten covenant.
But the Crimson Court does not forgive — and Lucien must decide whether to maintain the cold certainty of his immortal existence, or risk everything for a mortal life he never believed possible.
A Note on the World
The Characters
Lucien Varenne
Like someone who has been waiting so long he's forgotten what he's waiting for.
Three thousand years old. An enforcer of the Crimson Court. He has watched empires rise and fall, and has never, until Yorkshire, been seen.
Eliza Caven
A woman the world had decided not to notice — until something noticed her back.
Twenty-seven. A village governess. The last surviving descendant of a bloodline she does not yet understand, and the first person in three millennia to look Lucien in the face and recognize what she saw.
An Excerpt
The first thing Eliza Caven noticed about the stranger was that he had been standing very still for a long time.
The second thing was that the wind, which had been moving everything else in the lane — the bracken, the high grass beyond the dry-stone wall, her own hair coming loose from its pins — did not appear to be moving him at all.
"You have been waiting," she said, when she had walked close enough that not speaking would have been the rude choice.
He turned his head toward her with the careful, specific economy of a man who had decided in advance how much he intended to move.
"I have," he said.
"For what?"
The pause that followed had weather in it.
"I am not yet certain," he said.
— from The Mortal Crystalline
A Theme Song
Caribbean Blue
by Enya · the song that lived in the room while this book was being written
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