Every book in The Falcon's Binding is written against one constraint, and it is the constraint that makes the rest of it work.
Nothing contradicts the archive. Everything lives where the archive went quiet.
The dates hold. The trials happened when they happened and ended how they ended. The people are the real people, doing the documented things, in the documented order. Nobody is spared who was not spared. If the record says a woman was pressed to death beneath a door in York in March 1586, she is pressed to death beneath a door in York in March 1586, and no invention is permitted to reach in and stop it.
Why bind yourself like that
Because the alternative is cheap, and because the archive is stranger than anything you would put in its place.
A historical novel that rearranges its facts to suit its plot has quietly told you that none of it is load-bearing — that the past is a set for the story rather than the thing the story is about. Once the reader senses that, nothing has stakes, because anything could have been otherwise.
The opposite bargain is much better. Hold every documented fact rigid, and the invention has to live in the gaps — and the gaps in a sixteenth-century record are enormous. A transcript stops mid-examination and resumes on another day with no explanation. A payment is entered in a household book with no purpose written beside it. A man is in Antwerp in one document and in Prague in the next and nobody wrote down the six weeks between. A woman refuses to plead and the court record notes the refusal without a syllable of why.
Those are not errors in the record. They are the shape of the record. Somebody, at the time, either did not know or did not write it down, and the silence is now permanent.
What lives in the gap
That is the only territory these novels claim. Not what if this had gone differently — it did not go differently — but what if the reason it went exactly that way is not the reason we assume.
Which is why the supernatural element in these books never rescues anybody. It cannot. The ending is fixed before the first page. All it can do is supply a motive for the documented sequence of events, and a motive is a far more disquieting thing to add to a real atrocity than an escape would be.
Reading the books against the sources
Each novel is written so that you could take it to the primary sources and check. We would encourage it. The pleasure on offer is not look what the author invented but look what was already there — and the discovery, most of the time, is that the genuinely unsettling material was in the record all along, sitting in plain view in a coroner's report or a bailiff's accounts, waiting for somebody to notice that it had never actually been explained.
Two of those source threads are laid out at length here: Ballyvadlea in 1895, and Gráinne Ní Mháille and the 1593 audience at Greenwich.