One door closes. One opens onto 1528.

Friends. The first door is the one I have been promising you, and it is open at last. Bone Sacrament — the second and final book of the Reliquary Duet — is live. The story that began at Ashenmere, with Else and her cracked mortar and a covenant sealed in bone, is complete. The road runs out of the village, through the January frost, all the way to Provence, and the chapel above the town is not the only one with a foundation older than Rome.

I cried at the end of this book. I will be honest about that. Else and Callum's story did not resolve the way I planned when I outlined it two winters ago — it resolved itself, and I wrote what they did. I think you will know what I mean when you reach the last chapter.

The second door is the new one — and it opens sooner than it feels. The Sweating Year, Book One of The Hollow Crown Duology, releases July 1. It is available to pre-order now, and you can be reading it on release morning.

It is 1528. The sweating sickness has come to Kent. Anne Boleyn lies in her chamber at Hever, soaked through, attended by women who do not know who has just come up the avenue in the dusk to claim her.

Anne does not die that night. The woman who came to take her stays at her bedside instead. The rule she has held for ten thousand years is broken, and the rest of the duology is what follows from a single quiet decision in a Kentish fever-room in June. It is Henry VIII's court from the year of the sweat through Anne's coronation, into the years that end on a scaffold — written in the same voice you know from the Reliquary Duet: sacramental, gothic, body-rooted, the cadence of a missal that bleeds.