The Falcon's Binding is nine novels set in a single world: a Tudor century where every fact of the record holds, and the magic runs just beneath it. Three of them form a trilogy that follows one curse through three reigns and should be read in order. The other six stand alone and can be entered from any door.
Start here: the trilogy
These three carry one continuous story, from the fall of a queen to the reign of her daughter. Read them in sequence.
1. One Crowned
Anne Boleyn is a witch, trained in secret down the Howard line and deepened in the cold courts of France. The one sorcery she is charged with — the bewitching of a king — is the single working she has refused all her life to do. She won Henry of England with her wit, and she means to hold him the same way. Then her children begin to die before they can be born.
2. Two Daughters of Ash
June 1536. The falcon queen is dead on the scaffold and Mary Tudor waits to feel free. The freedom never comes. Something was sealed that morning in her stepmother's blood, and it has folded itself into her own. For seventeen years the daughters of Henry Tudor circle one another: one warded and unknowing, the other hunting in the dark for a curse she cannot name.
Read more about Two Daughters of Ash
3. Three Queens
July 1553. Mary Tudor takes the throne she has wanted since she was a girl, and the cold thing that has lived in her since her mother's disgrace does not lift by one degree. Three women wore the crown of England, and not one of them was ever safe.
The six standalones
Each of these is a complete novel. They share the trilogy's world and its one rule — nothing contradicts the archive — but they need no prior reading.
- Íarraith — Grace O'Malley on the coast of Mayo, and the price agreed at a door nobody living remembers opening.
- More Glass Than Wall — Bess of Hardwick at seventeen, widowed eleven months, sitting up alone with a body and realising she is not alone in the room.
- The Forty-Eighth Key — John Dee, thirty years of prayer into an empty glass, and the young man with a false name who finally answers.
- Standing Mute — Margaret Clitherow of York, who kept the forbidden Mass alive above her husband's shop and would not plead.
- The Grey Horse — Bridget Cleary in County Tipperary, 1895, and a valley certain it was saving her.
- The Devil's Ledger — the North Berwick witch trials, and a death no one will ever understand. Coming soon.
If you only read one
Start with One Crowned if you want the spine of the series. Start with The Grey Horse if you want the one that frightens people most. Both are doors into the same house.