Maids, guard, servants even people from the castle where summoned to the courtyard, where the king arrived from battle. Although his face was masked as usual, there was a strange, vicious almost angry glint in his eye.

“On your knees,” he commanded Reynauld De Chattion, before slapping him with his ungloved leper’s hand.

The way he had said it—that low, husky, irate intensity. It had awoken something within you. Something that no peasant, no maid servant, should ever feel for her king.