Changeling

Changeling opens the Order of Darkness series with Luca Vero, a young man thrown out of his monastery on a charge of heresy and immediately recruited by a mysterious agent of the Church. His task: travel to the edges of Christendom recording signs that the end times are near, reporting back under sealed orders.

His first investigation takes him to a convent where the nuns are being driven mad, walking in their sleep, having visions, and bleeding from unexplained wounds. There he meets Lady Isolde, newly orphaned and shut away in the abbey by her half-brother, and her Moorish companion Ishraq. What starts as an inquiry into possible witchcraft becomes a shared journey, as Luca, Isolde, and Ishraq travel on together into stranger and more dangerous territory.

Set in fifteenth-century Europe, Changeling is Philippa Gregory's move from her usual Tudor court dramas into a young-adult historical adventure with supernatural undertones, the first of four books in the Order of Darkness series.