The Crown Alone

In the kingdom of Avarienne, power is inherited. Everything else must be earned.
A king who loves the wrong woman and cannot find the courage to choose her. A queen who stays - not for him, but because someone must. A prince who learns to lead and a daughter who learns to endure. A romance conducted in stolen hours across a forty-two day season, between two people too careful to admit what they are doing. A woman who married for duty and found something unexpected in the quiet. A woman who married in fear and has not stopped planning her way out. A duke who spent years behind glass, governing well and feeling nothing, until someone arrived on a spent horse and changed the quality of the quiet.
Five stories. One kingdom. The same question running beneath all of them:
What does it cost to be the person the crown requires - and what remains of you when the cost is paid?
The Crown Alone moves across three decades of Avarienne's history, from the fractures of a failing reign to the uncertain promise of a new one. It is a novel about love in its many difficult forms - the love that ruins, the love that holds, the love that arrives too late, and the love that is still, quietly, working on a plan. About the weight of names and the lives lived in their shadow. About what is built by the people history will not remember, and what is inherited by those it will.
The crown passes. The sitting room remains.
And in Avelyne's chair, a woman who has outlasted everything watches the next generation take its shape - and does not yet know what it will become.
Neither does anyone else.

Book Two of The Kingdom of Avarienne