It’s time for another #teasertuesday featuring the glamourous and magical Blackbriar Cove. If you’re new to the story, Blackbriar is the upcoming sequel to Silver Hollow. Every week I share little snippets as I write the next chapter in the Borderlands Saga. If you already know Silver Hollow, welcome back! I hope you enjoy this week’s teaser.
This episode was brought to you by period film ballroom scenes. The dresses…the dances…le sigh, I just can’t get enough of them.
*major spoilers for silver hollow below*
Blackbriar Cove
Borderlands #2 Teaser
Amie had spent much of life living as a human, with her past lives and gifts hidden by glamour. Drustan, the man she’d considered her father for nearly three decades, had put in precautions. Wouldn’t have done for the Unseelie to find them on the run, after all. Wouldn’t have done for Amie to suddenly remember Drustan had kidnapped her.
Amie had been considered a gifted storyteller, enough to sell books. Now she knew much of what she’d written were taken from memories. Now she was the bloody queen of Silver Hollow. And the queen desperately wanted to rub the sleep from her eyes before she did something rash like abandon her dancing partner in the ballroom and escape into the garden.
“And so I kept the child, for clearly, his own sister did not want him,” Gareth Alderson was crooning in her ear while they waltzed across the floor.
“Did you raise him as your ward?” Amie replied, though her mind was only half focused on his laughter and glimmering silver eyes. Eyes like diamonds, a voice like a song and surprising strength in the arm beneath her hand. Amie had learned an evening frock coat could conceal much while cutting a handsome frame on the wearer.
“Should I have?” Gareth Alderson said with a taunting grin. “I am afraid the thought did not occur to me. So many have wished themselves away to my lands unwittingly. I could hardly keep them all, and those who remain are always—how to put it delicately—changed.”
Amie tripped on the third step.
Gareth lifted her by the waist in a surprise twirl that to their audience would appear planned. His smile was sharp in a way that reminded her to be wary as he brought her back to her feet. “Careful, your Majesty. Your subjects are watching, and not all who came to celebrate your birthday are friendly as I.”
Amie gripped his hand and swallowed back bile at the underlying threat. She already knew she wanted to tell him. She had felt the vultures in the form of her land-owning neighbors hovering all evening. She felt very much like Nimue at that moment, ready to give him a piece of her mind. He’d been subtly giving as much to her all evening. From an uncomfortable dinner with Duke Alderson as the honored guest at her right, to the first in a string of dances after.
The moon had been out for over an hour, according to the great clock ticking high above them. She needed to recharge and she needed Emrys before she slipped and accidentally cursed in the old tongue.
Gareth Alderon took a step back and dipped his head in a perfectly elegant bow, and Amie realized the waltz was over. “I hope this to be the first of many dances, my Queen.”
The other couples had also broken apart and dispersed and Amie felt the pressure of their eyes alighting openly upon her. None of them had really stopped staring all evening.
She picked up the heavy emerald skirts—the same shade as her unnatural eyes—and tilted her head in acknowledgment.
“You must never bow to any of them,” Dameri had told her nearly a year before, the day they drove into the town of Silver Hollow to greet her subjects.
Another voice overlapped with her mother’s in her mind, far more unwelcome. His golden face taunting her from the other side of the looking glass. “Never let them see your fear. If you believe you’re an imposter so will they.”
Amie blinked and offered Duke Alderson a closed-lipped smile. “Thank you for the dance, Duke—”
“Please, do call me Gareth, your Majesty,” he interrupted. It was rude to interrupt a queen and judging from the twinkle in those diamond-like eyes, Alderson was well aware.
Amie forced her lips into an equally cheeky grin, as though they were sharing a secret. “Of course, and you may call me Queen.”
Arthur and her mother appeared just in time to catch Duke Alderson’s pleased smirk as he replied, “As you wish, my Queen.”
to be continued…
“In a single night of madness, Amie won the battle and lost the two people she loved most. As she struggles to be the queen her people need, her family band together against the hidden threat at their borders.
Haunted by the ghosts of her past, Amie strikes a pact with an ancient being called The Storyteller. In order to see Emrys again, they must put aside their blood feud, and cross the veil to a place of spirits and monsters.
Blackbriar Cove is a land where superstition and chaos reign, and spirits plague dreams. A dark curse has twisted the Unseelie who once lived in the home the Blackbriar twins vowed never to return. But death is not the end in Silver Hollow, and the war for the Borderlands has only begun.”
Pre-Order Blackbriar Cove
Add Blackbriar Cove to your Goodreads
Silver Hollow (Borderlands #1)
is available where eBooks are sold
Jennifer Silverwood 
Vowww…. Exciting….
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