Book One
The Crown Between Kingdoms
A marriage of treaties becomes a love made by choice, and then everything is taken.
Coming soon
The Dunrath Chronicles
The Crown Between Kingdoms
She crossed the world to marry a king she had never met.
The Dunrath Chronicles
She crossed the world to marry a king she had never met.
The Dunrath Chronicles · Book One
Scotland, early in the fifteenth century. James MacKenzie has worn his father's crown for barely a year. The clans watch their young king for weakness, an exiled half-brother gathers mercenaries across the sea, and the peace of a kingdom asks of him the one thing he never went looking for: a wife sent from half a world away.
Jasmine, youngest daughter of an Arabian sheikh, says yes to a king she has never seen. She leaves silk and sunlight for stone and sea-wind, crossing desert and ocean with her mother's pendant at her throat and her eldest sister's parting charge folded close: come alongside him, not behind him.
At the cliff-top castle of Dunrath, a treaty turns slowly into a courtship of small things. Shared suppers. A horse brought in secret from home. A lullaby sung against a storm. Trust is built the way all true things are built, deliberately and at cost, and by the first snow neither of them is pretending any longer.
Then an old enemy sets the Highlands burning, and everything they have carefully made is put to steel.
The Crown Between Kingdoms is the first book of The Dunrath Chronicles.
“I have no life that is not yours.”James MacKenzie · The Crown Between Kingdoms
Excerpt
The wind came hard off the hills, sharp with peat smoke and rain, carrying the iron scent of blood over the heather.
James MacKenzie, King of Scotland, reined in at the crest of the rise. He sat his horse with a stillness he did not wholly feel, because a hundred men would read their king's posture before they read the field, broad shoulders squared against the weather, rain running in rivulets down the short line of his trimmed beard. He looked down upon the glen below, where men were killing one another as men in this land had always done, with steel and old pride and no thought for the king who would have to account for them afterward.
Not for the first time, he thought how quickly pride could turn a patch of earth into a graveyard.
He saw more than soldiers when he looked below. He saw widows not yet made. Children not yet orphaned. Crofts that would stand empty by winter. Mothers waiting near cold hearths, not knowing yet that the last words spoken to their sons had already been the last.
There were always costs. He had never found a way to stop counting them.
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The Series
The Dunrath Chronicles is a trilogy of historical romance set in fifteenth-century Scotland. It follows the marriage of James MacKenzie, King of Scotland, and Jasmine, an Arabian princess who crossed the world to become his queen — one marriage, tested to its end and back.
All three books are listed below, in order.
Book One
A marriage of treaties becomes a love made by choice, and then everything is taken.
Coming soon
Book Two
What a woman will survive to keep a promise, and a child, alive.
In progress
Book Three
Every crown has its reckoning. This one comes home.
Planned
The Author
Eliza Linden writes slow-burn historical romance about quiet strength, chosen love, and marriages that become true partnerships. Her books favor deliberate pacing, close historical detail, and characters who earn every step they take toward each other.
The Dunrath Chronicles began with a single question: what would it take for two strangers from opposite ends of the medieval world to build something that could not be broken? The answer unfolds across fifteenth-century Scotland, in a castle above the western sea, one small courtesy at a time.
Eliza Linden is a pen name, and the face behind it stays out of frame. The books are the part worth looking at.
She is at work on Book Two.
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