The Stitcher's Debt

A Queen unwanted. A court watching. A woman with a needle and a secret that can alter flesh.

In the shadowed rooms beneath the Queen's lodgings, Cicely Lowden is known only as the Cutter.

She is a maker of garments, a keeper of measurements, and the daughter of a disgraced physician whose forbidden work died with him, or so the court believes. When powerful men summon her to remake a rejected Queen before the feast of St. Simon and Jude, Cicely understands at once that she has not been hired for cloth.

She has been hired for flesh.

The Queen is foreign, watched, judged, and quietly endangered. Her body has become evidence in a game she did not choose. Her face, her skin, her silence, her failure to please a king, all have been turned into weapons against her. Cicely is ordered to make her acceptable, but the deeper she works, the more she discovers that someone inside the palace has already begun a darker alteration.

A physician who does not touch.
A courtier who survives every accusation.
A hidden record of symptoms, doses, and decline.
A living thread that gives beauty only by taking something in return.

As the feast approaches, Cicely must decide how much of herself she is willing to spend to save a woman the court has already begun to erase.

Dark, elegant, and unsettling, The Stitcher's Debt is a Tudor gothic novel of beauty, blood, betrayal, and the terrible price of being remade for power.