Waking Up in the Middle Ages

Cybreline was the deadliest covert operative her agency ever produced — until a routine heist inside a Manhattan museum ends in gunfire, betrayal, and a bullet with her name on it. She expects a morgue. Instead she opens her eyes on a heap of plague corpses in a burned village, in a body that is not hers: a starving, waifish child with cropped hair, a stranger's face, and an unbreakable ring seared into her finger.

The world she wakes in is centuries behind her own and twice as deadly. Kingdoms run on serfdom and superstition, mages burn healers as witches, and the fae who once ruled the land have been slaughtered down to rumors. Her modern skills — close-quarters combat, lock-picking, tactical lying, a poker face that has faced interrogators — keep her alive one day at a time. Her new family does the rest: a shambling farmer who rescues her for cheap labor, a warm-hearted farmwife who feeds her like her own, and a pack of adopted brothers who turn her safehouse instincts into something dangerously close to home.

But Cybreline has never been content to merely survive. She takes jobs in cities of thieves, out-gambles a Prince of Thieves for a fortune, walks out of magical trials that should have killed her, and discovers that the ring on her finger hides an entire pocket world — land, sky, and river — that grows whenever she feeds it power. Then she pulls the kingdom's most famous landmark, the immovable Mage's Tower, straight into that hidden realm, and the age's true players finally turn to look at her: a Blood General with dead eyes and a boyish courier disguise, a Lady of Light whose kindness is a mask over old atrocities, fae queens in exile, and gods who bet on mortals for sport.

Because Cybreline is not human, whatever her papers claim. The magic that answers her call is older than the mages' orders, and the blood in her veins belongs to a race the world swore it had erased. Rebuilding a hidden sanctuary for the last fae and folk, one stolen treasure and one dismantled conspiracy at a time, she rises from camp follower to war commander to queen of a realm that officially does not exist — with every human kingdom, and more than one god, waiting for the chance to put her back in the ground.

Watching her climb is Lord Killian — the Blood General of Dycathion, cursed from birth to be desired by every woman who sees him, feared by every soldier who faces him, and untouched by all of them until a green-eyed page picks his pocket of a war hammer and never quite gives it back. Their romance starts as blackmail, grows through banter, contract kills, and battlefield triage, and survives a memory-wipe sacrifice, a war between realms, and more than one supposed goodbye. The tension burns hot and constant; the doors close and leave the rest to imagination.

Wake, survive, scheme, build, and — if the gods are careless — love. In the middle ages, Cybreline intends to do all five, on her own terms, and dare anyone to stop her.