No One Ever Meant It: A Romantic Fantasy

Nine parishes. Nine bells. Nine ways to stop being yourself.In Saint-Vespers a promise sworn where a bell can hear it binds, and when it becomes impossible the tower rings the broken tone and the Keeper comes to take a forfeit. Ivo Cauldwell has been the Keeper since he was eleven. He was given the ninth gift at a font by a woman nobody invited, and nine parishes have shut their doors to him since. He does not sleep. He is not believed. No vow made to him has ever once bound.There is a way to undo it. It has not been convened in six hundred years and it needs nine things: the nine bell-clappers that have rung a broken tone over somebody, gathered into one place, in one hour, on deaf ground.Every one of them is held bare-handed, and every one of them takes something permanent from the woman holding it. A running tally of what everybody owes her. The certainty that she is provisional. The ability to read a kindness as anything but a bid. The feeling of being bound by anything she did not say out loud.Mabry Strand is eighteen and has fifty-six days before the frost breaks. She has nineteen promises standing that she cannot keep, forty-two counts against her at the Chapter of Hark, and one hand. Everybody who could help her wants a price, and every price is somebody else's life.And the last clapper on the list gives her back every promise she has ever made, at the same volume, for ever - so that on the night she can finally set him free, she will not be able to find one single reason why she wanted to.No One Ever Meant It is the second book of The Ninth Gift - a romantic fantasy about debt, kindness, and what it costs to go on being the person who stays.