A Tour of Coravina, Before You Need To Know It

Every book in this series has needed its own place. Oxford, for Marcus. The Palazzo, for all of them, one way or another. Fin's penthouse in Via dell'Altura, which is a position with a view and not a home. Book four needed Coravina, and it needed it before I understood why.

A view of the harbor and town on Coravina Island, Kingdom of Marvidina

Coravina is the third island of Marvidinia — smaller, quieter, the kind of place people are from rather than the kind of place things happen. Olive groves. A harbor where everyone knows whose boat is whose. The most sheltered water in the kingdom. If Marvidinia and its capital Miraval is where the crown does its business, Coravina is where you go to stop being looked at.

Callista Pappas grew up here. She left it to go be useful somewhere harder — six months now in the Kingdom of Mizrah, doing the kind of nursing that doesn't leave much room to think about home. Book four is, among other things, about how far that decision turns out to be. Not in miles. In the other thing.

I didn't build Coravina to be pretty. I built it to be the thing Callie is measuring everything else against, whether she means to or not — the harbor that knows whose boat is whose, against a country that no longer has a government by dawn. You don't need the second thing yet to feel the weight of the first. That's the order I'm giving it to you in.

There's a version of this island's story I'm not telling yet — Coravina has more waiting in it than one book's worth, and I'd rather you meet it slowly, which rings true to how things operate there in general.

Off the Grid with a Royal is out November 20th.