One rule governs The Falcon's Binding: nothing contradicts the archive. The dates hold, the trials happened, the people are real, and the invention lives only in the gaps — the stopped transcript, the payment with no purpose beside it, the reason that was not the reason. Here is the history the novels are built on.
Anne Boleyn
The second wife of Henry VIII, mother of Elizabeth I, executed at the Tower of London in May 1536 on charges few historians now credit. The record leaves a great deal unexplained about her fall, and that unexplained space is where One Crowned lives.
Mary I, Lady Jane Grey and Elizabeth I
Three women held the English crown within eighteen months of one another. Mary Tudor took the throne in 1553 after Jane Grey's nine days ended on Tower Green. Elizabeth survived the Tower, survived Woodstock, and reigned forty-four years. Two Daughters of Ash and Three Queens follow all three.
Grace O'Malley
Gráinne Ní Mháille, chieftain of the Ó Máille family on the coast of Mayo, commanded ships and men through most of the sixteenth century and met Elizabeth I in person in 1593 — two queens, reportedly speaking Latin, neither curtseying. Íarraith asks what she was paying for all those years at sea.
Bess of Hardwick
Widowed at sixteen, married four times, and by the end of her life the second richest woman in England after the queen. She built Hardwick Hall, of which the country said: more glass than wall. More Glass Than Wall starts on the first night of the first widowhood.
John Dee
Mathematician, navigator, and astrologer to Elizabeth I, who spent decades trying to speak with angels through a scryer named Edward Kelley and recorded an entire language, Enochian, in his diaries. The Forty-Eighth Key takes the diaries at their word.
Margaret Clitherow
A butcher's wife of the Shambles in York who sheltered hunted priests and kept the forbidden Mass alive in a hidden room. Brought to trial in 1586, she refused to plead — sparing her children the ordeal of testifying — and was pressed to death. She was canonised in 1970. Standing Mute is her novel.
The North Berwick witch trials
In 1590 a storm nearly drowned James VI of Scotland as he sailed home with his bride, and the whisper ran that witches had raised it. The trials that followed reached the king himself, who questioned the accused personally and later wrote a book about witchcraft. The Devil's Ledger is drawn from them. Coming soon.
Bridget Cleary
In March 1895, in Ballyvadlea, County Tipperary, a young woman was burned to death by her husband and relatives who had convinced themselves she had been taken and replaced by a fairy. The case is one of the most disturbing in Irish legal history. The Grey Horse tells it as folk horror, and as the story of a country that was certain it was saving her.