She was sent to marry the heir. She wasn't told the hill was listening.
Elspeth Hargrove can read buildings through touch—through vibration, through the silent language of stone.
When she arrives at the Sedgewick estate to marry a man she has barely spoken to, she reads a house being pulled off its foundations by something beneath the ground.
Walls that breathe. Floors that tilt toward the forest. A chapel cold with iron. And a man who tends it all with rough hands and the careful distance of someone who already knows what the hill will do to her.
The spirit beneath Aldermere is older than language. It has been alone for ten thousand years, and it is learning—from the heat in the stone, from the roots in the walls, from the woman who placed her palm on its gatepost and listened.
Elspeth will not run. She will do something worse. She will build a door.
Slow-burn gothic romantasy with arranged marriage, forced proximity, and a sentient house.
For readers of Susanna Clarke and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Book 2 of The Rootbound Bride—each book stands alone.
