A Duchess of Her Own Making — Ravensglen, Season Two

Ravensglen, Book Two The wedding is over. The harder work begins. Isla Kerr is Duchess of Ravensglen now — but a title is not the same as acceptance, and the court that watched a herbalist’s daughter marry a duke has not stopped waiting for her to prove it was all a mistake. Lord Hume has gone quiet, not conceded. Lady Sinclair has not forgotten her cousin’s disgrace. And every drawing room in Scotland is still asking the same question: does she truly belong here, or was she only ever the old Queen’s passing fancy? Then Isla notices a cough that won’t leave. A breathlessness Margaret waves away as nothing. A fear Isla recognizes instantly, having watched it once before, in a father she couldn’t save. As Margaret’s health begins its slow, unstoppable decline, Isla finds herself fighting on two fronts at once — proving her legitimacy to a court that has never fully trusted her, and holding a private grief she cannot yet share with the husband she loves. Alasdair, forced to confront the possibility of losing his mother, must decide whether to retreat once more into the fortress grief once taught him to build — or let his wife carry him through a loss neither of them can prevent. Season Two is the story of a woman who stops being chosen and becomes, fully and unmistakably, herself — earning, through crisis and scandal and quiet daily courage, a place at Ravensglen’s head that no one can ever again call an accident of royal favor. And it is the story of a queen’s final gift: not a crown, not a title, but the certainty, given before she goes, that the daughter she found on a storm-swept road was always worthy of everything that finding brought her. A story of inherited grief, earned belonging, and the particular strength it takes to love someone through a loss you can see coming, one slow day at a time.