Umbra inhabit the Other Realm. When they put on their finery to join their British allies at a ball or meeting, they are feted almost as social media celebrities.

But as anyone who reads J. L. Dawn’s The Mortality of Queens soon realises these fae chaotic creatures have a darker side.

In the first book, the Earl of Grenville’s Umbra was partly  invented by a reader. Agnieszka was:

“A sibyl empress who owned half a mountain and four clouds in Pomerania – a country of which Stanton knew little, except for it being a besieged state beyond Prussia.

This description was easier to believe than Maraziel’s assertion that Agnieszka had been fashioned from drowned voles and the screams of lost children and amused herself firing arrows at travellers from behind a waterfall in western Dyfnaint.”