Beloved Daughter

In sixth-century Kent, lightning only strikes when wicked women will it.

A dead man's body lies in a lake. Seventeen-year-old Ardelle stands accused of murdering him. She has not yet shed the innocence of childhood, yet the dark boatman in the realm of the dead finds her guilty of trespassing on his domain. Her sentence: a lifetime of suffering at the hands of mortal men, not least of which her fellow "sisters in red" condemned to imprisonment for revealing the gifts of air, fire, earth, an...