Beneath the Hallowed Hill is set in Britain’s most mythic place, Avalon. In contemporary times, it’s Glastonbury. In Hill, we see my vision of Morgen le Fey and the community of priestesses who served the two sacred springs. Christina St. Clair has a new novel out that features Vivienne, the sorceress who imprisoned Merlin. Here’s how she describes her book:
Emily’s Shadow–a novel by Christina St. Clair
Happy days are not here again. That’s how Emily might have thought at the beginning of the family holiday in pretty Cornwall with her father, two brothers, and his new bride, a woman who could have been an older sister. Except she wasn’t. Nor was she a mother to Emily’s brothers. Emily had fulfilled that role after her mother was killed during the London Blitz.
Emily can scarcely allow herself to remember what happened. It had all been so fast. She’d not meant to let go of Byron’s hand during that awful fire bomb attack when the Elephant and Castle pub down the road went up in flames. Byron had darted out of their Andersen bomb shelter right into the midst of the battle. Mum chased him. The rest was history. Why dredge it up?
Yet, somehow, someway, such experiences must be released. Emily’s opportunity to release repressed anger came during that time in Cornwall. It came out of the dark past of antiquity in the form of the sorceress, Vivienne. This witch was the one who’d tricked Merlin, slipping a magic ring upon his finger, and then burying him under a sacred rock. Alas for her, Merlin had laid a spell upon her and sent her whirling through time and space to be trapped in a muddy hole beneath a hut that over the centuries had been rebuilt and rebuilt, with not a soul capable to help her.
Vivienne was not the best sorceress in the world, but she was clever, and as Emily and her family arrived to stay in the fishing cottage where Vivienne remained, she suddenly understood the flaw in Merlin’s spell upon her, and so she began conjuring magic to free herself.
With Vivienne’s freedom, Emily’s troubles began: disturbing thoughts, her brother acting more strange than ever, chaotic family times. Her father, or course, typical of him, didn’t notice a thing wrong. Why would he? He was the great hero who went off to war leaving the family to cope. Sure, he was doing what men all did, and sure he would have been called up anyway, but it hurt that he’d gone off leaving her in charge. She’d only been fourteen at the time. Now, though, she was older and wiser and had her own plans on how to live. They did not include an encounter with a medieval sorceress.
To read an excerpt go here.
To read her blog, go here.
Available from Amazon, Nook, and Sony