Books
Folklore that bites back. Magic with a paper trail.
I write fantasy that takes its myths seriously: books about binding-systems and border guards, hedgewitches and hall-of-mirrors towns, kings who shouldn't exist and girls who shouldn't have crossed the river. If you like your fantasy with weight, with stakes, and with the occasional footnote, you're in the right place.
[Browse the trilogy ↓] [Latest release ↓] [Sign up for new-release news →]
Coming Soon
Bone Citadel The Tower & Crown trilogy concludes. [Order →]
Just Released
The Book of Raziel Riverswake, Book 1 [Order →]
Now Available
Dreamspires · Of Snow and Salt · Darkwood Three new worlds, three new heroines. [Get notified →]
The Tower & Crown Trilogy
A trilogy about the elite that runs a kingdom, the Forest that built it, and the woman the system never accounted for.
Arcadia is dominated by the Magority—the Tower-trained magical elite who decide what counts as power and what gets erased. Sofia Lombardi is not one of them. She also isn't sure she's safe being herself in front of any of them. Across three books, Sofia goes from the country girl who tipped the Tower, to the legend the kingdom didn't know it needed, to the woman who has to decide what kind of country gets to exist on the other side of all of this.
Read in order: Ghost Flower → Gorgon Crown → Bone Citadel.
Ghost Flower
Tower & Crown · Book 1 · Available now
She's on a mission to topple the Tower.
Arcadia is dominated by the Magority, the Tower-trained magical elite. Living in the shadow of the Forest, under the thumb of the Tower, and forgotten by the Crown, non-mage Sofia Lombardi has had enough.
After an unexpected betrayal by her fiancé, Sofia is out to disrupt the status quo. She's been keeping a secret — one that will shake Arcadia to its core.
As the Tower scrambles to restore order, Sofia must find her way to survive against the watchful eyes of a powerful wizard and protect her people against the primeval powers of the Forest.
[Order on Amazon →] [Add on Goodreads →]
Gorgon Crown
Tower & Crown · Book 2 · Available now
A king behind a golden cage. A capital under siege. Four days to save them both.
Sofia Lombardi has barely stumbled out of the Forest when the world ends again. The castle has been swallowed by an impossible barrier — mana and ancient powers braided together in a way that should not exist. King Solen is trapped inside with hundreds of his people. Ilyria's foot soldiers were only the opening move, and something far worse is days away.
Casimir, the Tower's most terrifying mage, can't cast a single spell without his cursed mana root finishing him for good. And Sofia — the legendary Ghost Flower, the woman who tipped the Tower — has a mana root as empty as a wrung-out cloth.
She has four days. Maybe a week. And a kingdom to save.
[Order on Amazon →] [Add on Goodreads →]
Bone Citadel
Tower & Crown · Book 3 · The trilogy concludes · May 2026
The cure was supposed to hold.
Two months after Sofia broke the curse that was turning Casimir into an artifact, the curse is reaching for him again — testing the line between Arcadia and Ilyria, on a schedule. The system that built him still operates in the country he fled nine years ago, run by an archmage who has no name and a king who believes the country is his. Until that system is dismantled at its source, Casimir keeps tipping back toward the thing he was being made into.
So they go to Ilyria. Sofia, who was made by the Forest for exactly this work and is only now beginning to admit it. Casimir, who has not been home in nine years and is going under another man's name. Solen, alone on the throne for the first time, ruling a country that has just survived an invasion and is still deciding what shape it wants to take.
What Sofia and Casimir find in Ilyria is not the apparatus they crossed the border to dismantle. It is something older. Something that has been waiting for her, in particular, for a very long time.
Riverswake
Don't cross the river. Don't trust strangers. Never say thank you.
A duology about a town held together by rules nobody can quite remember the reasons for, and the woman who breaks all three on the same afternoon. Riverswake is a place where the wards are old, the temple's silences are older, and the bindings that have kept everyone safe for four centuries are starting to come apart at the seams. Magic has a paper trail here. So does murder.
Read in order: The Book of Raziel → The Hall of Mirrors.
The Book of Raziel
Riverswake · Book 1 · Available now
"There are three rules in Riverswake. Don't cross the river. Don't trust strangers. Never say thank you. I have, dear reader, just broken all three."
Raziel Galitzine has been the family ruin since she was twelve. She has no money, no power, and no future her town will allow her to want. The only thing she has left to her name is the family name itself — and the town has been working hard, for several generations, to make sure no one remembers it.
Then she crosses the forbidden river. Then she is rescued by a man who should not exist. Then she says two words she has been told her whole life she must never say to him, and Ilya is hers — bound by accident to a girl who has just noticed, for the first time in her life, that she might have power.
Riverswake's wards are old, the temple's silences are older, and someone in the council murdered Raziel's family one by one for a reason no one will speak aloud. As Raziel learns what she is — and what her town has been keeping out, and keeping in — she finds herself drawn into the kind of love story that does not end well, with a creature who has seen this story end before, and who has not yet decided to tell her how.
Some bindings can be broken. This is not one of them.
[Order on Amazon →] [Add on Goodreads →]
The Hall of Mirrors
Riverswake · Book 2 · Available now
"I came up through the water like a person climbing out of a well. I want to be honest with you, dear reader. I did not know, when I came up, which me was doing the climbing."
She is seventeen and she is four hundred. She is the girl who bound a daeva on her first day as a border guard, and she is the architect who built the cage that has held her town in place for four centuries. She is in love with a man who killed her in a previous life at her own request, and she is now expected to decide what to do with the world he has been keeping safe for her.
She is, by every measure she can apply to herself, awake.
Riverswake is not. The town is staggering through the consequences of a binding-system that has been quietly deranging its people for generations, and the wards are failing, and an old woman in a yellow dress has crossed the river without flinching, and Raziel — both of her — has nine days, more or less, to decide what kind of a thing she is going to be on the other side of this story.
She has been an architect once before. It did not end well.
What does it cost to be the person whose mistakes will outlive her, and whose corrections might cost more than the mistakes did?
Two souls. One body. One last chance to choose differently.
[Order on Amazon →] [Add on Goodreads →]
Standalones & New Worlds
Separate books, separate worlds. Each one a way in.
If the trilogies are where I live, the standalones are where I travel. Snowbound countries that lost the war. Forests that resist all attempts at mapping. A girl who hears a voice in her head and a kingdom no one can find. A disgraced sorceress and the porcupine she came home with. Read them in any order.
Dreamspires
Standalone · Coming soon
The voice has a name. The voice has a face. The voice has been waiting.
For six years, Haruko has been hearing a voice in her head. For six years, she has been almost sure she made him up. Now her doctor wants to send her to the sanatorium where children like her go to die — and the voice is telling her there is another way. A door, hidden in her dreams, into a world where curses are real and the cure for what is killing her is a king nobody can find.
[Get notified →]
Of Snow and Salt
Standalone · Coming soon
Solevia lost the war. Luka Darya lost everything else.
Her family is dead. The boy she loved is dead. And now the conquering Coslovians are marching what's left of her countrymen through the snow, and Luka has decided she'd rather freeze than be saved by the enemy.
The enemy saves her anyway. His name is Nicholai Kostya. He is unfairly handsome, unbearably kind, and absolutely a Coslovian — which means Luka is going to hate him with everything she has left. Then a rumor reaches her from the survivors' camp: a boy matching Dmitri's description was seen alive a year ago. And suddenly, surviving matters again.
In a world of ice and war, some promises are written in blood.
[Get notified →]
Nightingale
Standalone · Coming soon
Some songs are promises. Some are warnings.
A novel about the cost of being heard, the cost of being silent, and the songs we sing when we can't tell the difference.
Full description coming closer to release.
[Get notified →]
The Hedgewitch
Standalone · Coming soon
The familiar you deserve is the one you can never escape.
River Lake was supposed to save the world. Born with magic that needs no familiar, she was the prodigy a kingdom had waited two centuries for — a Grand Sorceress in waiting, betrothed to the king's nephew, groomed since childhood for a destiny written in the stars. On Veilfall, she would walk between worlds and return bonded to a familiar worthy of her power.
She returned half-dead, clawed across the back, contracted to a blind, snub-nosed porcupine no bigger than a loaf of bread.
Branded a fraud and a traitor, abandoned by the suitors and sycophants who once begged her favor, River is exiled to the poisoned Western Waste to live out her days as a hedgewitch — the lowest rung of magician, barely magic at all. But something is rotting in the capital. A new fashion in jewelry is sweeping the court. The king is dead. And the thing River met behind the veil is still waiting for her to come home.
[Get notified →]
Darkwood
Standalone · Coming soon
She sells candles, drinks before noon, and predicts the weather from a feeling behind her sternum that she'd rather not discuss. Ten years ago, she was Taryn Rose, and she led forty-six soldiers into the Darkwood. She was the only one who walked out. Now Commander Dole — the man who sent them in — wants her to do it again. He has blackmail, a new expedition, and a co-commander: Bastien, a White Mage and healer who looks at Taryn with the frank, delighted curiosity of someone examining a particularly interesting beetle. She hates him immediately.
The Darkwood is a forest that resists all attempts at mapping. Compass needles spin. Paths rearrange themselves. The creatures inside are wrong. No expedition has ever reached the center. But Bastien can feel the forest's heartbeat, and he says something is in pain. As they lead a company of terrified soldiers, overenthusiastic sappers, argumentative naturalists, and one spectacularly useless lord deeper into the Darkwood, Taryn begins to suspect that the forest isn't their enemy. It's their patient. And the thing at its heart has been waiting for her — for someone, for anyone — to come back.
[Get notified →]
Heart of a Dragon
Standalone · Coming soon
[Get notified →]