Serpent & Dove

Serpent & Dove is the first novel of Shelby Mahurin's series of the same name, published in 2019 by HarperTeen. It is set in the city of Cesarine, where witches are hunted, feared and burned by the Church, and where the two people at the centre of the story belong to opposite sides of that war, one of them trained to kill the other's kind.

Louise Le Blanc fled her coven two years ago and survives by stealing whatever she can and using no magic at all. Reid Diggory is a Chasseur sworn to the Church, and his life has been built on one rule: a witch does not get to live. Neither of them meant to meet, and both of them have people they are hiding from and cannot afford to be found by. Lou has spent two years learning how to be invisible, and Reid has spent his whole life being told exactly what he is for.

One badly chosen stunt leaves the two of them bound to each other in a marriage the Church cannot easily undo. That puts a witch and a witch hunter in the same house, with Lou's real enemies already looking for her and Reid's order watching for any sign of what he has married. The book runs on the arithmetic of that arrangement rather than on either of them changing their mind easily, and both of them have reasons to keep the marriage standing.

Mahurin sets the series in a city governed by the Church, with magic punishable and a set of factions competing for control of it. The first volume establishes Lou, Reid and the marriage, and the later books continue the same conflict between the covens and the Church. It is a fantasy romance with a large cast of witches, hunters and church officials, and it is the first of three novels about Lou and Reid.