The Bone Loom of Blackwater

About this book:

In the salt-drowned fens of Blackwater, the looms don't weave cloth—they weave fate. When Alethea Ward inherits her great-aunt's crumbling manor, she finds a cathedral of bog-oak and bone-white timber strung with a warp that drinks blood and a shuttle tipped with iron rust. The fabric on the beam isn't wool, silk, or linen. It's something that cuts the hand that touches it, absorbs the stain, and hums with the resonance of something that once lived, breathed, and screamed.

Alethea is a master weaver, trained in the clattering mills of Norwich, but the draft-books in the ash-hole speak of "the boiling," "the scrape," and fiber drawn warm from long pipes of limb. The parish collector wants his dues. The antiquarians want the frame. The old warper, Clout, knows the truth: the marsh gives up its dead, and the Wards have always known how to spin them. To keep her roof, Alethea must treadle the loom again—and the only weft left is what the fen provides.

Gothic, visceral, and steeped in the terrible beauty of a forgotten craft, *The Bone Loom of Blackwater* spins a tale where every thread is a life, every pattern a confession, and the final masterpiece demands a price no merchant would pay. Some cloths are meant to shroud the living. This one wears them.