The Ash and Roots: City That Refused a Crown

A crown is only ever offered. This city is about to be asked.London, the summer of 2027. In the worst heatwave in memory, a new national service asks every citizen to press one button: Agree Forever. Millions do. Those who choose Not Now find their answer quietly "deferred" at one minute to midnight.Elena Caruso knows what a door made of consent looks like; she has already closed two. Now the ring on her finger is warm again, and a woman in a fur coat has been seen in Guildhall Yard. She is gilded like an old altarpiece and smells of rabbit-skin glue. She calls herself the Chamberlain, and she has been waiting three hundred and sixty years for a crown.The only thing that can stop her is the City of London's oldest charter, a strip of skin that vanished in the Great Fire of 1666. It was last seen in the arms of a twelve-year-old girl who told the aldermen it was held by the Crown.To find it, Elena and Lucan Russo, once an immortal Keeper and now a mortal man, need Tom Walbrook. Tom is the guardian of a buried river, and he is serving time in a prison where visits come with a paywall. They will have to go down a forgotten well beneath a condemned pub, and learn what it means for a city to say no where everyone can see.The final volume of The Ash and the Roots is a dark, atmospheric fantasy about old London, stubborn love, and the power of a single signature. It brings the trilogy to a close.Roots remember. So does ash.