The Bear-Keeper’s Daughter

By Cassia Fairweather

A forbidden marriage changes the law of an empire.

About the story

He finds her in a dyer’s yard. The empire will see something far more dangerous.

Theodora has left the stage and built a trade of her own in Constantinople. She keeps her accounts, bargains over wool, and has no interest in handing a stranger the story of her life simply because he wears a senator’s tablion.

The man who crouches beside her worktable knows something about dye—and, more unexpectedly, how to listen without turning her past into an accusation. The attention between them begins in wool grease and sharp conversation, far from the language of imperial destiny. What grows from it will confront rules written to keep their worlds apart.

A historical romance imagining Justinian and Theodora, from a private encounter to a forbidden marriage with consequences beyond the couple themselves.

Your kind of romance?

• Justinian and Theodora
• Byzantine Constantinople
• A former performer building an independent life
• A forbidden marriage across social divisions

Read a short excerpt

From the opening pages

“No.” I said it flatly, daring him to make something of it, the way men so often wanted to make something of a woman with no man standing behind her ledger.

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