The Binding
Shadow Queen
I put out a hand to steady myself as the vision took me.
The parquetry floor washed to black … As if sparked by the hard glare, a fire burst and raged through the room, the flames hot enough to crisp bones and raise the smell of marrow burning to cinders.
And me in the middle, wrapped in the black shroud of the dead.
When Matilde's exiled aunt, Helena, turns up for the most important festival of the year, suspicion abounds. Why has Helena – long married into the despised Ilthean nobility – suddenly returned? And what of the Ilthean soldiers massed at the southern border?
Hard on Helena's arrival, Matilde is struck by a vision warning of doom. And it isn't long before a forceful new enemy strikes at the very heart of power, leaving a trail of death and destruction in his wake.
After narrowly surviving the conflagration that shatters her entire world, Matilde must pit herself against her family's conqueror – her new husband – in a battle not just for the throne, but for her very existence.
Shadow Bound
Roshi was squinting at my brow, and Dieter’s mark.
I own you, Matilde, Dieter had said on our wedding night. I’ve bound you as one binds a golem.
Three symbols he’d inscribed on my brow, using ink and bloodstone and firelight, spelling out truth. Erase the leftmost, he had told me, and the meaning changed to death.
Roshi tipped her head to the side and said, ‘Weren’t there three before?’
I snatched up a bronze salver, turned it over and polished the base of it with the bed sheets. The warm metal reflected staring eyes and grimy cheeks – and a brow marked by only two symbols.
Meit: Death.
Sidonius, the famed slave-born general of the Ilthean empire, has conquered every land he invaded. His military strength regained Matilde the throne, but the payment he demanded in return was a vow of vassalage.
Worse, although Dieter has fled, he is not yet defeated. His forces launch strike after strike, sorely testing Matilde's new and uncertain hold on power. Every day he remains uncaptured drives Matilde — and with her, the Turasi nation — deeper into the debt of the Ilthean empire.
And the empire does not look kindly on vassals who try to secede.
But Matilde does not look kindly on those who would bind her to their will — and Sidonius has under-estimated her.
