Richard surged forward, landed them both on the ground, and slit the man’s throat as he got back to his feet. Perhaps there would be two or three seconds before the men behind noticed. Long enough for a sprint, a quick dodge around the sentinel’s men. A slash to the horse’s belly would bring the king down close enough for a blade at the base of his ear before Richard was dragged down himself.

Some weaker part of Richard wondered what would come of Berengaria if he died. Certainly he ought to think more achingly of never seeing his wife again. That’s what other men would do, no doubt. They’d cling to the idea of her and remember the last time they had seen her, or carry a trinket or some petty useless remembrance as if that would help them come home alive. Whispering words into a lock of hair had, historically, never proven adequate armor against steel. He would be more than willing to accept such pedestrian superstition once he witnessed the hand of God reach down, catch an arrow, and hurl it instead at a different soldier who had never discovered true love.

No, love was no asset. Richard had watched a man grieve once over a lost lover. Really, truly grieve. Some nasty business in France where nothing had gone smoothly, the men had broken rank and rampaged through an unimportant fishing village. One of Richard’s companions—whose name he couldn’t place now—suddenly collapsed. The man was not injured but his eyes were wide, unmoving. They locked on a woman’s body down the lane, a tangle of black hair with one rigid arm clutching some amount of pretty fabric. Bone and dark crimson stretched wide toward them from her side, split open. This man, some man, his eyes nearly dried to bark so long did he not blink. He was oblivious Richard was even there staring at him—oblivious to what a Richard might be. All the man could see was the woman’s body, a trick of the mind mistaking it for his lover’s. Richard was awestruck. Impossible, that the body could be so entirely shut down by emotion—a tangible reaction to nothing. Richard was almost jealous. He had never felt anything that powerful. This otherwise healthy man broke, simply broke.

Some confused being broken with being weak, but anything can break, no matter how strong. The one thing you can never judge in a man, he recited, is what makes him break. But you can learn from him, to avoid having that same flaw.

The King, that other Richard, had waylaid his war for his weakness. History would remember that single pathetic act, and how it sealed his fate. It gave his enemy time to prepare a defense, to strategize, to lay traps. Enabling a single assassin, embedded in the English army …