Raised in the shadow of a cruel monarchy, Jamie Campbell is a bastard peasant marked for death after his guardian is executed by the King’s Watch for tax evasion. Fleeing into the wilderness, he falls in with the Black Rider, a disgraced knight turned masked mercenary—feared across the realm—who strips him down and reforges him through brutal training in the arts of war and deception.
Far to the north, the remnants of a shattered rebellion smolder. To end the war, Scottish lord Henry Beverley surrenders his daughter, Margaret, to the Crown—offered in marriage to King Lionel Taylor as a political prize. Her brother, Peter “Mad Peter” Beverley, escapes the slaughter. Branded a rogue, he becomes all that remains of the Scottish army: a living threat, a blood debt unresolved.
When Jamie learns that his lover, Lillian, has been seized and enslaved by the Crown, he and the Black Rider devise a reckless plan—to infiltrate the royal court disguised as members of a traveling theatre troupe summoned to perform for the King himself.
Inside the castle, the kingdom rots from within. Haunted by the specter of Peter Beverley’s survival and unraveling beneath the strain of a fragile peace, King Lionel clings to power through paranoia and bloodshed. True authority, however, rests with his brother, Prince Damien Taylor—the “Black Prince”—whose calculated cruelty sustains the crown even as it corrodes it. While his brother fears war beyond the walls, Damien turns his gaze inward, hunting an unknown threat moving through his court.
Living under a false name among actors, courtiers, and spies, Jamie is drawn into palace intrigue—and into a forbidden romance with Margaret Beverley, the captive Scottish princess bound to the king by war and diplomacy. As Peter marches south with the last gasp of the rebellion, determined to reclaim his sister and erase the Taylor dynasty from history, pressure mounts on every front.
Caught between performance and survival, love and rebellion, Jamie uncovers truths that threaten to tear the kingdom apart—truths about the man who forged him, the crown, and the role he was born to play.
And beneath the castle, something older than crowns and bloodlines begins to wake.
