Jeanne, Vicomtesse de Cherdillac is bored. The Rotenek season is flat, her latest lover has grown tediously jealous and her usual crowd of friends fails to amuse. When Antuniet turns up on her doorstep seeking patronage for her alchemy experiments, what begins as amusement turns to interest, then something deeper. But Antuniet’s work draws danger that threatens even the crown of Alpennia.
The alchemy of precious gems throws two women into a crucible of adversity, but it is the alchemy of the human heart that transforms them both in this breathtaking follow-up to the widely acclaimed Daughter of Mystery.
Heather Rose Jones is the author of the "Skin Singer" stories in the Sword and Sorceress anthology series, as well as non-fiction publications on topics ranging from biotech to historic costume to naming practices.
Visitors to her social media will find the Lesbian Historic Motif Project she began to change the unexamined assumptions about the place and nature of lesbian-like characters in historic fact, literature, art, and imaginations. She has a PhD from U.C. Berkeley in Linguistics, specializing in the semantics of Medieval Welsh prepositions, and works as an industrial discrepancy investigator for a major Bay Area pharmaceutical company.