The First Covenant
Kindle Unlimited · print and audio everywhere
Before there was a curse, there was a bargain.
Before there was a bargain, there was a mother with a dying son and a hill that hummed beneath her feet.
Elspeth Hargrove arrives at the Sedgewick estate in 1700 to fulfil a deal she did not make. Her mother walked into the forest on the hill and asked for her son's life. Something answered. Something healed the boy and cleared the wells. The crops came back. Three days later, a man came asking about Hargrove daughters.
Now Elspeth stands on ground that vibrates through her bones, facing a house built on a hill that does not want to be climbed, married to a man who walks like a building that is slightly off-true. She has her grandmother's gift: the ability to read what the land is saying through her hands and feet.
And what the land beneath the Sedgewick estate is saying is that something vast and desperately lonely lives in the roots, and it has been promised a bride.
But Elspeth is not a woman who accepts terms she did not write. Over sixteen months of stone-language and iron wards, of midnight negotiations with a consciousness older than human speech, she will do what no one has attempted: build an escape route that will take three hundred years to reach.
The origin story of the Rootbound Bride series — about the woman who looked at a three-hundred-year curse and said: I can build a door.
For readers of Susanna Clarke, Katherine Arden, and Naomi Novik. If you loved the world-building of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell or the folklore of The Bear and the Nightingale, this is where Aldermere began.
- Length
- 414 pages
- Published
- 13 April 2026
- Genre
- Gothic horror
