

You can see the cover reveal and read an excerpt here at io9/gizmodo.


I can’t wait for you to meet Artemisia and the revenant-I hope you love them as much as I do! It’s about a girl training to be a nun who awakens an ancient spirit bound to a saint’s relic, and becomes a Joan of Arc type figure as she wields its power to battle the undead. Hi all, this is the book I like to describe as medieval Venom starring a nun and a ghost. Those of you who have advance copies will notice a lot of word repetition and, in general, prose that reads suspiciously as though it was written by a depressed AI struggling to imitate human behavior, which was my default state during Covid isolation, when I wrote the majority of this book. Update: I think digital ARCs have begun circulating, and wanted to mention that I'm doing further edits that will appear in the final version but not the ARC. And when a hidden evil begins to surface, she discovers that facing this enemy might require her to betray everything she has been taught to believe-if the revenant doesn’t betray her first. With all knowledge of vespertines lost to time, Artemisia turns to the last remaining expert for help: the revenant itself.Īs she unravels a sinister mystery of saints, secrets, and dark magic, her bond with the revenant grows.

Wielding its extraordinary power almost consumes her-but death has come to Loraille, and only a vespertine, a priestess trained to wield a high relic, has any chance of stopping it. It is a revenant, a malevolent being that threatens to possess her the moment she drops her guard. When her convent is attacked by possessed soldiers, Artemisia defends it by awakening an ancient spirit bound to a saint’s relic. She would rather deal with the dead than the living, who trade whispers about her scarred hands and troubled past. Artemisia is training to be a Gray Sister, a nun who cleanses the bodies of the deceased so that their souls can pass on otherwise, they will rise as spirits with a ravenous hunger for the living.
