BOOk 02: Of Portals and the Gloaming
The Inklings fell out of one realm and into a blizzard, which is not generally considered an improvement.
They have escaped the Colorless Kingdoms with their skins, most of their belongings, and rather fewer key coins than they started with. What they do not have is Jules — who is several realms away in the keeping of a six-hundred-year-old witch named Bhagga, being marched toward the Poppet Swamps, where he is expected to serve as an ingredient.
Between here and there: a Snow Ape with a marble fortress, a devoted guard of winterpillars, and a stable of woolen turtles that can bite a blizzardworm in half. A swamp where the lily pads have appetites and opinions. A porcelain doll that walks, talks, and belongs to nobody's nursery.
And a realm called the Gloaming, where it is always twilight and always summer-warm, where the stars hang so thick they cast faint blue shadows, and where a Lordling named Gowrey has gone down on one knee and asked Mary Doyle to be his bride.
Mary is fifteen and a quarter. She has never been in love before. She believes this is the finest thing that has ever happened to her.
Her brothers do not care for him. Neither does the shadowpillar who serves him. Neither, as it happens, does anyone who has looked closely at his eyes.
Far above it all, three goddesses watch through a looking-glass and lay their wagers, because the Beast's bargain was very precisely worded. Mary cannot be forced. She cannot be possessed. She cannot be tricked into ruin against her will.
She has to choose it.
And a girl will say yes to very nearly anything at an altar, if she loves the one standing opposite.
Book Two of The Chronicles of Ber'Ebrin. Some vows cost rather more than others.
Release Date: December 1, 2026. Pre-order now.
Snow was falling and swirling in thick clumps all about the Inklings, piling upon their shoulders and heads. A winter storm had overtaken them, and it was growing worse by the moment. Bitter gusts of wind knifed through their clothing and straight into their very bones. The air itself seemed to howl; the world was reduced to a colorless blur where ground and sky were one. Between the blasts, they glimpsed nothing but shifting veils of white and heard only the ghostly moan of the storm around them—no horizon, no landmarks, not even the faintest hint of the gateway that had delivered them.
After leaping through the portal, Gowrey and the four children—Mary, Charles, Charlotte, and Edgar—found themselves in a wintry realm of ice and snow. In a painting, it might have seemed astonishingly beautiful; in life, it was nothing less than deadly.
Their beloved Professor Peabody lay in the snow-packed drifts, half wrapped in the white cloth he had accidentally dragged with him when he tumbled backward through the Drake Lord’s portal. He lay still as a doornail. The children flung themselves to his side, dragged the sheet away, and shook him, fearing that the Woodqueen’s curse had struck him down.
“Professor!” Mary cried urgently, shaking him. “Professor Peabody!”
“Professor, wake up!” said Charlotte, patting his cheeks. “Are you hurt?”
The professor slowly opened his eyes. He looked up into the anxious faces of the Inklings and smiled. They were so covered in snow that they put him in mind of little snowmen. He blinked as cold, wet flakes kept falling into his eyes. He gave his head a shake, tested his arms and legs, and felt for any broken bones. All seemed in order.
“I suppose we’ve escaped,” he chuckled, realizing he had somehow survived the certain doom—or dismemberment—awaiting him at the hands of his scorned fiancée, the Woodqueen. He was still panting, his breath a pale cloud in the frigid air, and his mutton-chop whiskers were nearly white with frost and falling snow. “Oooooh, and my backside is soaked nearly through,” he muttered. “My britches shall freeze to me like a wet flag to a metal pole in December.”
“We thought you were cursed for sure!” Edgar said. “Maybe even dead!” As a willowpillar, he was the only one not much bothered by the cold, thanks to his ample (and now very useful) coat of brown fur. He gave the professor a great bear hug and then did his best to heave him to his feet. The others quickly joined in, and together they hauled the professor upright until he stood, somewhat shakily, on his legs.
Finally, the professor was up, clutching his back and complaining as his muscles ached from the fall. “Oh, dear—my back and my legs. I’m really beginning to feel my age,” he lamented. “Well, at least my derby’s intact,” he added, stooping to fish his hat out of a snowdrift.
“And look here,” he said, pointing to the spot where he had been lying, “I’ve smashed two of the vials on my potion-belt in that fall. And my, oh my, is that not peculiar?” One of the spilled liquids was sending up a thin column of smoke from the snow. At first, the smoke was blue; then it turned a curious shade of green. “Hmmmph!” he sniffed. He had not the foggiest notion what the other broken vial had managed to do.
Charles laughed and pointed to the back of the professor’s robe. “I think you landed on some sort of bleaching agent. You have a white circle on your coat as big as your head!”
The professor sighed. “Doesn’t that beat all? Still, it could be worse. I might have broken something more precious than those vials—my spectacles, for instance, or my own tail-bone!” Only now did he truly feel the bite of the air—a sharp, merciless cold that gnawed straight through his coat. He clutched his arms across his chest, huffed white clouds into the howling wind, and began hopping from foot to foot as though conducting some desperate folk dance. “Brrr! It’s certainly cold here!”