I said at the end of the last one that Lucien's face across a dinner table was doing more work than it appeared to be. This is the book where I show you what he was thinking. It's out today.
Lucien is Crown Prince of Sorvaine, a title he holds on loan. It reverts the moment his brother has a son. He is, in other words, the heir to a job designed to be taken away from him, and he's expected to give himself to it completely anyway: to train for a sovereignty that isn't his and was never meant to stay his, to be wholly ready for a role he's meant to hand back.
But he has no problem with handing it back. He doesn't want to be sovereign. The complication is that wanting has never had much to do with it: there's a great-grandfather in the family history who stood exactly here, second son, crown prince during his brother's reign, and ended up with the crown anyway. A man asked to pour himself entirely into a thing he hopes never fully becomes his. What does a person like that do with himself?
Book 2 is my answer.
The Quiet One
He was supposed to be the resentful one. I've said this before — back when there were just four brothers and no book, Lucien was going to be the one who said out loud that he hated it. He refused to do that in Book 1 and went quiet instead, and the quiet is what I've been circling ever since.
There are things in this book I put on the page that come from somewhere close to me. I said last time I wasn't ready to talk about it, and I'm still not, quite. What I'll say is that writing a character who manages something for thirty years without ever once naming it — who is so good at the managing that everyone reads it as coldness — required me to understand it from the inside. Some of that understanding was not research. That's as far as I want to open the door today. Maybe further, another time.
The One Question
What the Crown Requires's hardest problem was a silence I had to make airtight — Julian couldn't just tell Imogen the truth, and I had to earn every second of that.
What the Crown Costs handed me the opposite problem, and it was almost worse. Because Lucien and Isabelle's entire tangle is this: they could have solved it with one question. He decides early what she feels — that she resents being handed from one brother to the next like a dish to offer around — and he builds a whole careful architecture on top of that decision. And she never corrects him, because nobody has ever asked her what she actually feels, so why would she expect this man to be the first?
The danger with two people who won't ask each other the obvious question is that the reader starts shouting just talk to each other — and the moment they do that, you've lost them. So the not-asking couldn't be a plot device. It had to be the truest thing about both of them. He doesn't ask because asking means finding out, and he has spent his life not finding out. She doesn't volunteer because being consulted, genuinely, is so foreign to her that she doesn't recognize the shape of it when it finally arrives. When one of them does finally ask — really ask — it had to feel like the most intimate thing in the book, because for these two it is. That's the part I'd point to first.
The Other Thing that Nearly Ate Me Alive
The research thread.
Isabelle and Lucien spend a good part of this book picking apart a piece of scholarship, and the trouble is that it turns on three dates thirty years apart — 1612, 1614, 1642 — that are not the same kind of thing at all, and want desperately to blur into each other.
One is an event. One is a portrait made after the event, which is the whole reason it becomes a problem. One is a document written decades later, looking back, that names some things and pointedly doesn't name the thing everyone wants.
The entire plot depends on a reader — and the characters, and me — never letting those three collapse into one. Which meant I couldn't let them collapse, and they wanted to, constantly. I made a timeline. I ignored my own timeline. I remade the timeline. There is a version of me standing at a wall going no — that one's the portrait, the portrait is later. If the archive scenes read as effortless, know that they were the opposite, and I have never been happier to hide the labor.
(There's a whole post coming on the real history under this, for anyone who wants the cover off the machine. Later, and with a spoiler wall in front of it.)
Out There Now
Same as last time: self-published, no machinery behind it but you. That part doesn't get less frightening the second time.
If you read it and it lands, a review genuinely changes what happens next for a book like this. And if you've been here since Julian and Imogen — if you came back for the quiet brother — thank you. I didn't know, when I gave him that one look across a dinner table, how much I'd want to spend a whole book finding out what was behind it.
It's yours now.
Thank you for being here.
What the Crown Costs is available on Kindle Unlimited, Ebook, and Softcover.