
Cait Monroe
fantasy author
BOOKS
SHIELD SWORN
coming October 2026!

A hostage warrior looking for escape.
A conscript-slave hoping to buy his own freedom.The only way to survive is to trust each other—or sell the other one out first.
Revni came for gold; Eavus came to conquer. But when their two armies clash in an unexpected skirmish, Revni is taken hostage—only in chasing down the girl, Eavus loses his cohort. If he doesn’t report in soon, he’ll be declared a deserter. If she doesn’t reach her people before they can declare her dead, her right to a home will be forfeit.She’ll be sold. He’ll be executed.But to make it to the capital city, they’ll need to cross the wilds of a territory their two empires have been carving up for themselves.Can you trust a captor to protect you? Can you trust a hostage to keep her word? Because there’s only one place where both of them might have a chance to beg for freedom—and if they get there, only one of them will get it.
Inspired by Roman and Norse invasions of Celtic Britain, Cait Monroe’s immersive debut novel invites readers into a grounded fantasy adventure that will pit love against honor, loyalty against freedom, and confront the cost of being on the winning side.
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About
Cait Monroe loves remote islands, well-used swords, yearning of any variety, and is a sucker for a good gear-up. She likes her fantasy grounded, her romance complicated, and her whiskey neat. She lives in North Carolina with her Irish Wolfhound and a few select humans.
AI Policy
I believe that generative LLMs anywhere near human creation are quite likely the worst thing to ever happen to humanity, and that one day we're going to look back on this insane era the way people now look back on doctors birthing babies with their bare, unwashed hands just after debriding corpses. That is, ew. Gross. You should all be condemned to a particular subset of purgatory where you have to listen to politicians and tech-bros all day long and try to translate their speech into legitimate human emotion.Ahem.You will never find AI anywhere near my work. Not in my search engine, not in my emails, not even to check grammar. You might find typos, but never AI. I support human artists, human editors, and human writers, in all our flawed glory.
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