February 1809. The French army sits before Saragossa, enduring its second siege in six months, and General Junot faces a peculiar crisis: his soldiers are so starved for salt that they flavor their soup with saltpetre scraped from their own cartridges. Enter Eugène Ducos, a twenty-year-old captain of effortless daring, an artist by temperament who has flown to war as to the field most fertile of daring new effects. He is dispatched into the surrounding chaos to find salt, but the mission becomes something far richer than a supply run. Across his path falls Anita, a goatherd searching for her lost love Eugenio, while the Juntas vengeful women stalk the margins of the conflict, and the grim arithmetic of survival plays out against the burning city. Capes writes with the swagger of a man who knows his hero is destined for legend, crafting a tale where personal ambition, romantic longing, and the brutal logic of siege warfare collide. This is historical fiction in the grand old mode: romantic, vivid, unashamed of its swashbuckling charms. For readers who want to be transported to a specific moment of history and made to feel its texture, its danger, and its strange poetry.
