Gothic romantasy: the elder sister, the chosen bride, and the brother the curse forgot.
The carriage stopped before Clarissa Hargrove had finished counting the years the house had stood.
She has spent twenty-two years hiding what she can do. She reads the age of made things—the iron in a hinge, the oak of a worktable, the silver worked into a bound man's wrist—and every wrought object she passes presses its years against her, constantly, asking to be counted. She has learned to keep silent about it. She has learned to keep silent about a great many things.
Now she has crossed the Yorkshire moors to Aldermere Hall, to stand beside her younger sister, who has been chosen as the next bride of the Sedgewick house. The family is old. The match is good. The wedding is set for the spring.
And the house keeps its own arithmetic. The matriarch reads people the way Clarissa reads iron, and has been studying the Hargrove sisters by letter for a year. The chapel on the lawn is centuries older than the hall around it. In a workshop off the steward's office, the younger Sedgewick brother—the one man at Aldermere whose presence falls quiet against her gift—sits bent over a pocket watch that is not his to open.
The longer Clarissa stays, the more clearly she reads what the household is built to do, and the more she understands that her sister's marriage serves a purpose the family has been careful never to name. By spring she will know exactly what Aldermere asks of the women who walk into its walls—and exactly what it will cost her to love anyone inside them.
A standalone companion to the Rootbound Bride series. Gothic romantasy with the patience of a literary fairy tale.
