Story by Sharon Kay PenmanPROLOGUE ( Read more... )

Constance did not like him very much, this unctuous instrument of her enemy’s doom, and she withdrew her fingers as soon as his lips grazed her skin. She felt no gratitude; he’d been very well paid, after all. In truth, she found herself scorning him for the very betrayal that would serve her son so well. Loyalty was the currency of kingship and he ( Read more... )

Andre was already familiar with the letter, but he made a show of reading it as if for the first time. Rising from his seat in a gesture of respect for Raoul de Fougeres’s years and stature, he passed the letter to the older man. Raoul read without comment, offered it to Alain de Dinan. One by one, they read the letter, studying those dangling wax ( Read more... )

Richard Coeur de Lion. England’s charismatic crusader-king, celebrated throughout Christendom for his courage, his bravura deeds on the bloody battlefields of the Holy Land, his mastery of the arts of war. But in Constance’s mouth, the admiring sobriquet became a sardonic epithet, for her loathing of her Angevin in-laws burned to the very bone ( Read more... )