Caelum
This is the world for the novel Court Chess: A Modern Woman's Guide to Intrigue, an Edwardian-era pre-war inspired world that is slowly falling into war...
In an Edwardian-inspired alternate universe, most of the known industrual world is on the brink of a world-encompassing war and alliances are being called in—both human and magical. However, this means little to Posey du Blys—who goes solely by her surname Blys—a transplant to the relatively impoverished country of Raela, where she lives in genteel poverty in the country with her toxic mother, her loving but ill stepfather, and her stepsister Jane who is secretly half-fae through her mother, who was a changeling. Blys, with her keen intelligence and prickly personality, has been running the family fortune and finances as best she can as a woman, but eventually her stepfather calls in Jane’s uncle, the Earl of Ordun, to help the family with their affairs.
The earl agrees to send his niece and her stepsister to court—but Blys must marry within the year or be turned over to destitution. Honestly, considering the sheer amount of executions and accusations of treason being made at court, Blys is more concerned about that. Not to mention as the ugly stepsister to her supernaturally beautiful stepsister with essentially no dowry to speak of, this is going to be nearly impossible. However, Blys’s attention is immediately turned at court from marriage to protecting Jane who has caught the eye of King Helion, who had just beheaded his third wife on dubious charges of on an affair not even a year prior while on the hunt for a wife to bear him a son.
Terrified for her sister’s life in this deadly court, Blys must make a plan. She has no ability to influence the king or the earl, who is pleased at his niece capturing the king’s interest. However, she can slither into the social circles of the court gossips and those jealous of her stepsister, playing that she is one of them, while influencing beautiful and charismatic ladies of court to try to capture the king’s interest secretly.
Everyone assumes that Blys’s intentions are exactly what they seem on the surface except for an influential diplomat from the country of Dubar–and the king’s cousin–Ajmal Shirazi–who rather than reveal her treasonous intentions discreetly helps her on occasion while calling in Raela’s alliance into play for Dubar in the upcoming war. However, Blys does not know what his intentions are with her and must treat him as another snake in the snake’s den, even as her heart grows softer towards him.