The Troth Returns in September

Friends. Two pieces of news this month, and a gift at the bottom of the page for everyone who finished The Beast Beneath the Bells.

First: The Quickening Year arrives August 22nd. Book Two of The Hollow Crown is written, finished, and waiting — if you haven't preordered, there is still time to have it appear on your device at midnight while you sleep, which remains my favorite piece of quiet magic this industry ever invented.

Second, and I've been holding this one like a coal in my cupped hands: the Troth returns in September. The King Beneath the Hill — Book Two — leaves London and 1888 behind and goes west, and down: to Glastonbury, to the last summer of the abbey, to a hollow hill with a door in it and something very old and very tired holding that door alone. A conservator falls through, because that is what happens to women whose hands know a mendable break from an unmendable one. What she finds under the hill is not what the stories promised.

I'm doing this one differently. No preorder. When it's done — and it is nearly done — it will simply appear, the way the best doors open: without announcement, all at once. The newsletter will know the hour it happens; nobody else will. If that isn't a reason to be on the list, I don't know what is.

This month's letter carries the real folklore the new book is built on — the king under Glastonbury Tor, the saint who threw holy water at him, and the thorn that flowers at midwinter. Read it free →

If you haven't finished Book One, this scene will spoil its ending — go no further, and know that I envy you the first read. For everyone else: the first spring.

The ice went out of the river in the first week of March, and the river made a sound she had no word for — a long, grinding exhale, floe against floe against stone, all the way down from the bridges to the sea.

Cordelia heard it from the workroom window and put down her paste brush and went out.

Low tide, first light. The foreshore below Blackfriars lay in its winter colors, brown and gray and the sudden shocking green of weed on the old stairs, and the ice was leaving in rafts — great gray plates of it turning in the current, unhurried, like a hand at the end of a long labor taking off its gloves finger by finger.

He was standing at the waterline with his back to her, watching it go.

She had learned his postures the way she had once learned watermarks — by holding them up to the light until the structure declared itself. There was the stillness that meant listening, which went down through his feet into the riverbed and out along forty miles of tideway. There was the stillness that meant remembering, which had a weight to it, a settling, the whole great architecture of him lowering itself around something old. This was neither. His head was tipped back a degree. The ridges along his shoulders had loosened. The tail moved in the shallows, slow, writing something idle in the silt and smoothing it away again.

This one she had only started cataloguing in January. It didn't have a Latin name. The nearest she had come was unclenched.

“You could watch it from the water,” she said, picking her way down the stairs. The green weed had opinions about her boots. “It's your river.”

“I have watched it from the water for seven hundred years.” He did not turn. The voice moved through the foreshore the way it always did, up through the soles of her feet before it arrived at her ears. “From the water, the ice is a weight that lifts. From here it is a thing that leaves. I am learning the difference.”

“And?”

“It is better from here.”

She came and stood beside him, at the line where the shingle went dark. The morning was cold enough that his heat reached her from a foot away, a hearth with no wall behind it, and she leaned into the edge of it without touching him, which was its own form of touch, and both of them knew it.

Three months. The city went on above them exactly as before — the drays on the bridge, the tide tables in the shipping columns, the whole obliviously mended world. The bell hung where they had hung it, and she checked it the way she checked her own hands each morning: without ceremony, without doubt, the quick professional glance that says still sound. What had changed was not the river or the city. What had changed was that the figure at the waterline stood there because he chose to, and could have been elsewhere, and was not.

She had a letter from Agnes in her apron pocket, ten days old, read four times. Liverpool suited her the way a ship suits a woman waiting for one — that was Agnes's own line; she'd underscored it twice. The comb was sewn into her good coat's lining for the crossing. You'll say I'm foolish for carrying a comb like contraband, she'd written, but it doesn't feel like mine to lose. It feels lent. Cordelia had read that sentence and sat very still for a moment, and then filed it in the drawer of things that were true and could not yet be acted on.

“The estuary sent word upriver,” he said.

She looked at the water. Word from the estuary meant the Mouth, and the Mouth did not gossip. The Mouth placed things. “Saying?”

“That the thaw runs west as well.” He was quiet through the length of one wave, one retreat. “There is a door in the west country. Under a hill. Old — older than mine, in its way; the hill was holding before this city had a name to hold. The one who keeps it has kept it alone for a long time.” A pause, and then, with a colleague's exactness: “Three hundred years, close on, since anyone kept it with him.”

“What happened three hundred years ago?”

“The bells there went quiet.”

The tide turned while she thought about that. She knew how to read the sentence; she'd had a winter's schooling in the grammar. Bells were not ornament. Bells were the remembering, rung on a schedule, the vow said aloud in bronze twice a day — and a door whose bells had gone quiet was a door held from one side only, by one back only, for as long as the back lasted.

“Is it fraying,” she said. Not quite a question.

“It is held.” The word did what the word always did in his mouth: bore weight without complaint. “Held is not the same as well.”

She thought of a man alone at a threshold with no one to say the other half of the promise to him, for three hundred years, and her hands made the small involuntary motion they made over any break that had been left too long — the flinch of wanting tools she didn't have and jurisdiction she hadn't been given.

He saw it. He saw everything her hands did; it was the language of hers he had learned first.

“It is not yours to mend,” he said, and there was no rebuke in it, only accuracy, and under the accuracy something she was still learning to name in him, that might have been the beginning of hope held at arm's length. “The Troth does its own placing. The estuary said one thing more.”

“Tell me.”

“That the thread is already cut, and the piece is already chosen, and it is not from this century.” The ridges along his shoulders settled. Out on the water the last raft of ice turned once, found the current, and went seaward, done with its holding. “Whoever she is, she is already falling.”

Cordelia stood at the edge of his warmth in the first light of the first thaw, and did what she could do from a foreshore two hundred miles east of a hill she would never see: she took the letter's habit and filed it, in the drawer of things that were true and could not yet be acted on. Whoever you are — mend well.

West of there, under a hollow hill, a door held.