He was right in that. They didn’t speak of her again. But it wasn’t her mother who died, it was her father, who didn’t rise from his bed after a fever struck him down two years later.

She didn’t mourn him. He’d been dead to her since the day he’d taken her to see her mother hanging in a cage. Her father had taught her a lesson that day, although not the one he intended. The image of her mother treated so brutally and Joan’s inability to do anything to stop it would stay with her forever, as would her hatred toward the king who’d put her there and the man who had refused to lift a finger to help her. She never saw her father in the same way again.

She would never see many things the same way again. No longer was she a spectator in the war between Scotland and England. From that day forward, seeing Edward of England defeated and Robert Bruce on the throne became all that mattered. She’d failed to free her mother from the cage, but she would do everything she could to ensure that her mother’s suffering had not been in vain.

She should have taken the lashing. At least those scars might have had a chance to heal.

Chapter 1

1

Carlisle Castle, Cumbria, England, April 16, 1314

YOU ARE DRIVING me wild,” the young knight said as he frantically pressed his hot mouth all over her neck. “God, you smell so good.”

Joan wished she could say the same, but as Sir Richard Fitzgerald—the second-in-command of the Earl of Ulster’s Irish naval forces—had cornered her after the midday meal, he smelled distinctly of smoked herring, which needless to say was not her favorite.

When he tried to press his mouth on hers again, not even the prospect of learning the movements of the entire English fleet could have stopped her from turning her head. “We can’t,” she said softly. The slight breathiness in her voice was not from passion, but from the effort of fending off a determined would-be lover tired of hearing no. “Someone might discover us.”

Which was why she’d chosen this as a place to meet. It was private but not too private. She never left herself without a means of escape.

Deftly twisting out of his tentacle-like embrace with the ease of someone who’d had practice escaping men with hands like a hydra many times before, she looked around anxiously as if to prove her point.

They stood in a quiet section of the garden in the castle’s outer ward, where she’d announced that she was going to take a stroll after the long meal. As she’d intended, Sir Richard had followed her there and had pulled her behind one of the rose trellises.