National Network for Equitable Library Service

Winner of the Aurora Award for Best Novel. Hell is empty and all the devils are here. The Chatelaine has come. The year is 1328 and Bruges is under siege by the Chatelaine of Hell and her army of chimeras — creatures forged in the deep fires of the Hellbeast. At night, revenants crawl over the walls and bring plague and grief to this city of widows. Margriet de Vos learns she's a widow herself when her good-for-nothing husband comes home dead from the war. But he didn't come back for her. The revenant who was her husband pulls a secret treasure of coins and weapons from under his floorboards and goes back through the mouth of the beast called Hell. Margriet killed her first soldier when she was eleven. She's buried six of her seven children. She'll do anything for her daughter, even if it means raiding Hell itself to get her inheritance back. Margriet's daughter Beatrix is haunted by a dead husband of her own, and blessed, or cursed, with an enchanted distaff that allows her to control the revenants and see the future. Together with a transgender man-at-arms who has unfinished business with the Chatelaine, a traumatised widow with a giant water-powered forgehammer at her disposal, and a wealthy alderman's wife who escapes Bruges with her children, Margriet and Beatrix forge a raiding party the likes of which Hell has never seen...