After Ever After, Book Two: This Blood Means Life

As Book Two opens, Queen Ella (Cinderella) continues the illusion of her fairy-tale marriage, even with its innocence long lost, repressing her own fury at Sol's careless infidelity and abandonment of his kingdom to moral and ecological decay. Queen Mina (Beauty and the Beast) continues to deny the sensual inner magic she discovered with Priestess Lemara, crushing herself into humility through hardship and continual miscarriage. Lemara Hummingbird (Sleeping Beauty) resigns herself to arranged marriage in a new world she doesn't believe in, diverting her passion into dream, memory, and her daughter's imaginary future.

But Princess Rowan (Snow White)-true, forgotten queen of the old northern wilderness-has escaped her brutal prince captor at last, releasing wild horses in her wake. And Rhiannon her Dark Faerie mother will not let shadows rest. When Ella makes pilgrimage to Mina's kingdom at last, to request aid for the birth of her twin girls from the Divine Feminine hidden there, the queens' newfound friendship awakens them, by tenderness, jealousy and furious longing, to painful questions long denied. Burdened by the sickness of a husband who denies his beastly nature, unknown to herself beyond the identity of caretaker, Mina is left in desperation to take the lone journey men take-but not into the forest, and not to find peace. And Ella, inspired by Mina, must defy expectations to find courage within marriage and throne-especially when her kingdom, having denied its own shadow for so many years, falls easily to surprise attack by Barbarians.

Offering up her daughter to be priestess of a world long gone, Lemara loses her in dreams to the keening underworld of the Divine Masculine. When Ruya runs from her own arranged marriage, Lemara's search for her becomes her search for all that is lost-what can only be found in her own broken heart, and that of her king. Surrendering to Rhiannon in exchange for her people's salvation, she emerges from the sea forever changed, unrecognizable to her husband and yet for the first time able to awaken a volcano for the sake of their Divine Marriage. Meanwhile Rowan, the lost feminine soul at the heart of all, recognized only by an unknown, outcast huntsmen of the Barbarians, must pass through the fairy-tale mirror to become conscious of herself at last, so that the world can open to love.