The Night Ward's Maggot Girl

About this book:

In the fetid sub-crypt of Saint Jude-in-the-Fen, orphan Elowen tends a garden of pearlescent larvae that eat only dead flesh—her "girls" are the hospital's last, unspoken resort when prayer and pigeon-blood poultices fail. Despised by the monks as a witch's get, she guards a darker secret behind loose flue-tiles: an iron kettle culturing a blue-green mold that weeps amber medicine, a legacy from a mother hanged for healing too well. When a knight arrives with a lance-shaft rotting in his thigh and river-fever climbing his neck, Elowen must choose between the safety of anonymity and the heretical knowledge that could save him—and condemn her.

Sir Brand of the High Crag carries more than splintered ash in his wound; he bears a banner, a debt, and enemies who would see the Earl's western levy broken in the mud. As the Prior's inquisitor circles the abbey gates and Brother Jerome's "cures" pile bodies in the slop-ditch, Elowen's green-bottle grubs and bitter moss-water become the only bulwark against a rot that spreads from flesh to stone. But the mold in her kettle hungers for more than carrion, and the knight's fever dreams whisper of crypt-blooms blooming on battlefields where no flower should grow.

Grim, visceral, and shot through with the strange beauty of decay, *The Night Ward's Maggot Girl* blends medieval medical horror with a heroine who wields scalpels made of heron-bone and science disguised as superstition. For readers who crave the mud-and-blood realism of *The Physician* crossed with the uncanny fungal dread of *Mexican Gothic*—where the line between cure and corruption is drawn in maggot-tracks across a dying man's skin.