From the cosmology of The Hollow Crown Duology. Safe for everyone; spoils nothing.
The ring is iron. It is heavy enough to be noticed when worn and noticed more when not. It has no stone, no gem, no maker's mark. It bears, on the inside of the band, three small grooves whose meaning no one has ever explained to the woman who wears it. She has had it since before she knew she was the one who would have it.
It is the sigil of office. It binds her to the work of mercy in the British Isles — to the dying in every village and chamber and battlefield and birthing bed from the Hebrides to the Channel, from the year the stones at Avebury were raised to whatever year is the last one. While she wears it, she is the reaper. The body she walks in is a cover. The face she shows is borrowed. The work is the only thing in her that is hers.
It is also, she has been told once, a vow. By whom and to whom, she has never asked.
It runs cold against her finger when she has done the work as it should be done. It runs colder when she has not. It has not gone warm since a year that did not yet have a number, when a herd of cattle drowned in a fen near the place that would one day be called Cambridge, and she was very young, and a woman in a coracle looked at her and said, take the ring, child, before it asks too much of you, and she did not.
It can be removed.
She does not know that it can be removed. She believes the binding is mortal in shape — that the ring goes off her finger only when the finger goes off the bone. She is wrong about this. It is, in truth, a willing vow. It was always willing. The work was never imposed. The mercy is hers because she has chosen, for ten thousand years, to be the one who carries it. The ring stays on because she does not yet know she has been choosing.
One being has touched it. One. In a small chapel at Leicester Abbey, on the night a cardinal of the English church died of grief and a small fever and a long failure of nerve, a man with one eye and a leather patch put his hand over hers where the ring sits. He has loved her for ten thousand years. He has wanted, for most of them, to ease the weight of what she carries. He is the only one who has understood that he could not — that to ease it would be to ask her to be something other than what she has chosen — and so he has stayed, and waited, and put his hand over hers without taking the ring off, because she did not ask him to.
She has not taken the ring off either.
Yet.
The Sweating Year, Book One of The Hollow Crown Duology, releases August 1.