THE FLAME KEEPER

In 1689, the Church knows exactly what Siobhán Ní Bhriain is.

She is nineteen years old, the last high-concentration carrier of an ancient Celtic sacred lineage, trained since childhood in the knowledge her mother passed down in whispers: what she carries, why Rome has been hunting women like her since the Synod of Whitby, and why survival is the first and most sacred obligation of a flame-keeper in a world that has been systematically erasing them for a thousand years. When the Church's men come for her in the dark of a February night - not three days away as warned, but here, now, with their warrants and their documentation and the flat bureaucratic efficiency of an institution that has done this before - Siobhán does not fight. Her mother told her not to fight. She told her to survive.

What follows is thirty-eight days in the hold of a ship with thirty-six women and eight deaths, a colonial dock in Saint-Domingue where three women from the enslaved African community push through the processing queue to reach her before the Church's agent can complete his paperwork, and a community that has been waiting for her specifically - not because they were told she was coming, but because their own tradition knew. The Vodou loa tradition and the Celtic flame-keeper practice have never met. They are not the same thing. But they have arrived, independently, at the same territory: the woman who stands at the boundary between the living and the dead and makes the crossing different. The community in Saint-Domingue has a name for what Siobhán is. It is not the same name her mother used. It is more complete.

And then there is Baron Samedi - the lord of death himself, appearing on her third day in the colony with a lit cigar, a hat that belongs to no particular decade, dark glasses that do not yet exist in 1692, and the most spectacularly inappropriate opening line she has ever heard. He has been at the dock since before the ship left Bristol. He has been waiting, with the specific patience of a being who has nowhere else to be, for the woman who will eventually become his equal - not his subordinate, not his possession, his equal - and he intends to wait as long as it takes.

It takes thirty-six years.

THE FLAME KEEPER is a Gothic supernatural novel about what a thousand years of institutional violence cannot extinguish - and the woman who kept the names so that no one she walked to the threshold would die without being known.

For readers of The Mists of Avalon, Mexican Gothic, and The Historian.