Echoes of the Otherworld

Description

In the last years of the old gods, the line between Ireland and the Otherworld is starting to give way.

Ríona has spent her life pretending she cannot hear what waits on the other side of it. The visions. The voices of the dead. The cold that comes down when the veil goes thin. She has hidden all of it and told no one what she is.

Then the Heartstone of Danu begins to fail.

It is the old anchor, the thing that has held the living world and the Otherworld apart since before anyone now living was born. As its light goes out, the two realms start to bleed into one another. Crows gather where they have no reason to. The dead will not stay in the ground. The old rites stop holding. None of it keeps the Otherworld where it belongs.

Nothing chooses her for this. She goes anyway, north and west into older country, with a warrior who will not speak, a poet who cannot see, and a spirit who will not lie quiet. The dying gods set her on the road. The Morrígan watches from the hedgerows in her crow’s shape and says nothing, and the silence is worse than any warning.

What Ríona is walking toward will cost her. Her voice. The life she might have had. Her place among the living.

Echoes of the Otherworld is Book One of the Songs of the Crowmother trilogy. For readers of Madeline Miller, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Juliet Marillier.