France is bleeding. The Wars of Religion have torn the kingdom apart, and Gaspard de Vibrac has survived what should have killed him. He carries the weight of friends who drowned in Lake Geneva, who rotted in galleys, who died at the hands of executioners while he lived on as a leper of honor. Now he finds himself tangled in another conspiracy, this one threatening to unmask him entirely, and at its center is Marie de Marcilly, the wife of his friend, the woman he cannot stop loving. Their affair unfolds in the shadowed corridors of power where a wrong word means death, where loyalty is a currency that fluctuates hourly, and where Gaspard must decide whether redemption is even possible for a man who has already sold pieces of his soul. Yeats writes with the atmospheric weight of a man who understands that history is not just made of battles and treaties, but of private shames and impossible choices. This is a novel about what survival costs.
