Winter, 1362. After years of successful campaigning in France, Thomas Blackstone, a common archer knighted at Crécy, has rised to become Edward III's Master of War. But the title is as much a curse as a blessing. Success has brought few rewards: his family – bar his son Henry – are dead, slaughtered; his enemies only multiply. Death, in so many guises, beckons. As he battles to enforce his King's claim to France's lands, Blackstone will assault an impregnable fortress, he'll become embroiled in a feud between French aristocrats, he'll be forced into pitched battle in the dead of winter... and he'll be asked to pay an impossible price to protect something much more precious to the King than mere land... All the while, a group of trained killers, burning with vengeance, draw ever-closer.