The Man Who Died at Poitiers
He cannot stay dead. In this army, that is the thing most likely to get him killed.
Gascony, 1355. The Black Prince is burning a road to Poitiers, and the man who builds his siege engines has a wound that closed overnight.
Kindle, paperback, and Kindle Unlimited.
In the summer of 1355 the Prince of Wales rode out of Bordeaux with somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 men and orders to ruin everything between the sea and Toulouse. Towns that paid were spared. Towns that did not were burned to the sills.
Somewhere in the baggage train is a pressed engineer who can tell you how many fascines it takes to cross a marsh, how long a wall stands under a trebuchet, and what a man costs to feed on the march. He is very good at his work. He has had a long time to learn it.
He is also careful, in the way of a man with something to hide, because a wound that closed overnight is not a miracle in this century. It is evidence. And the men who find evidence build a fire around it.
What you are buying
130,000 words. 44 chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue. It begins with the great raid of 1355 and it ends at Poitiers in September 1356.
It is a complete story. It ends where it was always going to end, and there is no cliffhanger standing in for one.
It is also the first campaign of The Unwritten Man, and there will be more. Those two facts are not in tension. The second book will be a different war.
The campaign is the real one
Bordeaux to the Mediterranean and back, river by river, town by town, burned or ransomed as it happened. 675 miles in 59 days.
The medieval sources are Geoffrey le Baker, Froissart, the Chandos Herald, the Eulogium and Malmesbury chroniclers, Sir John Wingfield's letter home, and the Prince's own letters. The modern spine is Hoskins, Hewitt, and Sumption. They are named because you should check them, and because on at least one crossing they do not agree with each other.
The route and the sourcesThe Man Who Died at Poitiers is the first campaign of The Unwritten Man.
It is not the first one he has fought. It will not be the last.
The seriesNot ready to buy a book by someone you have never read
Reasonable. Here is the prologue and the first three chapters, laid out properly, free. Not a teaser and not a page and a half of front matter.
Read them and decide. That is the entire pitch.