Between Two Ancient Skies

Three weeks after her great-aunt's funeral, a letter arrives from a notary in the south of France, and Edie Ashworth discovers her family has guarded a secret for eight hundred years. Clearing the house at the end of the lane, she finds a tobacco tin beneath a floorboard: a lead pendant of two triangles crossed, worn smooth, and a sealed envelope addressed to a woman whose name her family never speaks aloud. The notary encloses a brass key worked into a rose, and the rose matches the birthmark on Edie's wrist exactly. Her search leads south, to a village that burned in 1210, where the river runs underground and the same name keeps appearing in registers across the centuries. In March 1244, a woman came down the east face of Montségur by rope, carried a box to England, and buried it under a church floor without ever explaining herself. Between Two Ancient Skies is a novel about the stories a family tells to survive, and the one version left under the floorboards for somebody else to find.