The Keeper of Small Vows: A Romantic Fantasy

Nine parishes. Nine bells. Every promise heard, and every promise collected.In Saint-Vespers a vow sworn inside a bell's reach binds. Break it - or let it become impossible - and the tower rings the broken tone, a note struck wrong on purpose, flat and split and unfinished. You have one hour to put it right. After that the Keeper comes, and the Keeper takes a forfeit: a hand, a memory, a road you may never walk down again.Mabry Strand is eighteen and she is a Sitter. She sits with the dying so they do not go out alone, and in ninety-one rooms she has said the small kind things the dying ask for. *Nol won't be left on his own. I'll get him out, before the Quarter.* Forty-two of those are still standing in her name, and there is no arithmetic in the world that makes forty-two a smaller number.Ivo Cauldwell is nineteen and he is the Keeper. At his christening a ninth godmother nobody invited gave him the gift of keeping every promise made in his hearing, 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.Then Mabry's promises begin to fail - not by accident and not by bad luck, but in order, on a schedule, entered in a clerk's neat hand in a ledger she was never meant to see. Somebody has spent nineteen years assembling a nine-part key to undo what was done to Ivo Cauldwell. Every turn of it costs somebody else everything. And the last ward on the list is hers.She has eleven weeks, one bell she is not licensed to ring, and a boy nobody in nine parishes will believe.The Keeper of Small Vows is the first book of The Ninth Gift - a romantic fantasy about debt, kindness, and what it costs to be the person who stays.