Hard Home (The Longbourn Accord #1)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a line of warding left long enough unattended must be in want of blood.

The courts that bargained with England are four hundred years gone.

What they left behind are the wardlines — invisible boundaries holding back things that have spent four centuries with nothing to look at, and are hungry to be seen.

The lines are mended only one way: a man lays his hands on the ground and gives up his gift, and the ground takes it, and does not give it back.

At Longbourn, the Accord is entailed upon the male line, and Mr. Bennet has five daughters. Elizabeth Bennet has a gift that has never once been wrong.

She can hear a lie the way other people hear a wrong note — which is precisely why, when a charming lieutenant tells her the truth about a question she has not actually asked, she believes every word of it, and goes on believing it while the ground beneath her county begins to let go.

Eleven miles east of Meryton lies a village that emptied in 1349, which every history blames on plague. The rector’s record says otherwise. It says the ground is sine virtute — without virtue.

And it is spreading. Marriage here is called braiding, and it cannot be undone by consent, or by law, or by any court in this kingdom.

Fitzwilliam Darcy holds one of the four oldest Accords in England. Neither of them can afford to be wrong about the other, and both of them are.

A romantasy retelling of Pride and Prejudice, in which every kindness is a theft, and the only person who saves Hertfordshire is the sister nobody looked at twice.