Avant: A Novel of the Cathars, Immortal Love, and Seven Centuries Reckoning: 1

Some memories survive seven centuries. Some loves refuse to accept what death means. In 1209, the Albigensian Crusade extinguished the last of the Cathar Parfaits at the fortress of Montségur. Their daughter survived. Her name was Cristine Ermesinde. What her parents left her - the essence, a sacred divine force they had given their lives to protect - made her ageless, purposeful, and hunted. Raised in a limestone village in the Cévennes mountains by a Knight Templar named Piers Dieudonné, Cristine grew up between two faiths and one love: Stiofan, an orphan boy who would be murdered before she could truly understand what she was. Before he died, he made her a promise - to find her again across whatever distance death put between them. That promise would take seven centuries to keep. Avant follows Cristine through plague, migration, two hundred years of solitary devotion in a hilltop grotto, an ocean crossing in steerage, and the quadroon balls of 1820 New Orleans - where she would finally confront the centuries-old enemies who had been circling her since the Fourth Crusade. What she discovers in New Orleans - about her sister, about the demon named Noctifer, about what grace and forgiveness actually require - is what the entire Médaillon series is built around. For readers of Kate Mosse's Labyrinth, V.E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and Deborah Harkness's A Discovery of Witches.