Devoted Books in Order

This is the smaller Borchardt series, just two books, but it carries many of the things she returned to again and again: old faiths under pressure, violent history, fierce love, and characters trying to build a life in a world that keeps breaking apart. The story centers on Elin and Owen in medieval France, where Viking attacks, local betrayal, and spiritual conflict never stay far in the background.

Elin is a woman of the Forest People, raised close to older pagan beliefs and gifted with sight. Owen is the young bishop of Chantalon, a Christian leader with real political and military burdens on his shoulders. Their relationship gives the books their shape. Borchardt does not treat them as easy opposites, pagan woman on one side, churchman on the other. Instead, she keeps pushing them into situations where love, faith, loyalty, and survival all pull in different directions.

Chantalon matters almost as much as either of them. The town and its surrounding woods, rivers, and roads feel like a borderland, a place where the older world has not fully vanished and the newer one has not become secure. That makes every raid, rumor, and private act of treachery hit harder. The outside threat of Viking violence is real, but so is the danger from frightened or ambitious people closer to home.

Love is only half the story.

In Devoted, Owen rescues Elin from Viking slavery, and the two are drawn into a marriage that quickly becomes a test of courage as enemies gather around Chantalon. The book mixes romance with siege pressure, revenge, and the strain of holding a community together. In Beguiled, Borchardt raises the tension by giving Elin a vision of fresh danger. While Owen rides out to seek help, Elin stays behind to defend their people, protect her unborn child, and deal with treachery working from inside as well as outside the walls.

The tone is earthy and intense. Borchardt likes battle scenes, storms, bodies in motion, and the blunt fact that survival in this world is never abstract. At the same time, the books care about tenderness, loyalty, and the uneasy ways belief shapes action. Elin's gifts are part of the story's supernatural edge, but the series is really driven by pressure, who can be trusted, what home is worth, and how much either love or faith can actually shield people.

These are intimate books set against large violence.

If you are curious about where Borchardt started, this series is a good place to see her blend of historical setting, sensuality, mysticism, and danger before the wolf and Arthurian novels. Across both books, she keeps asking the same hard question: how do two people stay devoted to each other when almost every force around them is trying to pull them apart?