By Heresies Distressed

Two kingdoms have joined forces against a Church they consider corrupt. Queen Sharleyan of Chisholm has married King Cayleb of Charis, and the two realms now form a single empire pledged to defend human freedom. The battle for the soul of the planet Safehold has begun.

Sharleyan, crowned Empress, expected a marriage of state and has found love with Cayleb instead. His defiance of the Group of Four, the ruthless men who govern mother Church, gives her a cause worthy of her mind and courage.

But Cayleb has been forbidden to tell her everything. Safehold's religion is a fabrication, a web of lies that has held humanity in chains for almost a thousand years. Beyond it lie the Gbaba, a genocidal alien race that will finish off mankind if humans ever draw its notice again.

One more secret sits close at hand. Nimue Alban, a young woman dead for nine hundred years, lives on in memory and mind inside the android body of the warrior-monk Merlin, whom Sharleyan knows only by that name.

This is the next stage of the Safehold war, told from a point where the heroine is ignorant of what her task demands. The secrets her husband must keep could cost the pair all they have built, and could cost Sharleyan her life.