When the Iron Rusts

55 AD. Britannia. The road is coming. The grove will not survive it. Marius Severus is a centurion of the Ninth Legion, tasked with driving a road through the last sacred grove in the western hills. He is iron and order and duty. He has not removed his armor in eleven hours. He has not questioned an order in eleven years. Elowen is the Keeper of the Spring—healer, priestess, the last guardian of a power that runs deeper than Rome's roads will ever reach. She knows the grove will burn. She has known since the dream. What she did not expect was the man in the iron, or the way the earth pulls her toward him like a current she cannot swim against. As the distance between the wall and the wild closes, Marius and Elowen are drawn into a collision that will echo across two thousand years. He will choose Rome. She will choose the Root. And the cost of that choosing will burn itself into flesh and stone and memory, becoming a debt the earth carries long after the iron rusts and the moss grows through the seam. When the Iron Rusts is a gothic fantasy romance novella set two thousand years before the events of the Cathedral of the Crows series. It can be read as a standalone, but readers of Mirror Heart and Gilded Blood will recognize the bones of this story—they've seen it in Ambrose's dreams.