Beneath the Barrow

Once a slave in a Roman household, now the last Bandrui of the Brigantes, Camma stands between Rome and the people it has conquered, between old gods and new order, between the man she loves and the land that still remembers every wound. Her gift has always been mediation. Translation. Standing in-between.

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But there is an older border in the land than the one Rome built in stone.

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Beneath a barrow at the edge of the fields, the door between the living world and the realm of Annwfn below is freezing shut. The cold of it climbs through the soil and into Camma's bones, and there is no-one else left who can help her learn what it means. Beyond it, a god has held his realm so still, for so long, that the stillness has become a slow kind of dying—and as the threshold hardens beyond thawing, the same slow death has begun to creep up into the living world above.

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Camma has spent her life holding the peace between worlds that have no wish to be reconciled. Now she is asked to hold the last of them—and the gift that kept her alive, the art of standing in the middle and belonging to neither side, may be the very thing that breaks her. To mend the border she must go down into the dark beneath the mound and learn what her grandmother died before she could teach her: what Camma is, when there is no one left to stand between.

Some borders can only be held by becoming them.

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Set on the Roman frontier in 128 CE, Beneath the Barrow braids history with Celtic myth into a story of buried memory, divided loyalty, and the cost of becoming who you were born to be. For readers of Madeline Miller, Susanna Clarke, and Marion Zimmer Bradley.