Prologue

August 1151

Eleanor bows her head as she passes under the low stone lintel into a room lit by three candles that stand along the wooden table. Blanche, her lady-in-waiting, steps into the room beside her. The old woman sitting at the table holds up the back of her hand, the nails filed to a sharp finish, and waves it vaguely.

“Only the queen,” croaks the voice.

Eleanor nods in reply to Blanche’s questioning look, and the young woman turns and hurries out, crossing herself as she closes the heavy door behind her. Looking into the face of the older woman sitting across the table, Eleanor wonders whether she should have allowed herself to come here.

Thin, arched brows have been painted onto her grandmother’s face. Her eyes, normally blue and milky, now look black in the shadow of the candlelight. Though Eleanor knows her grandmother began losing her hair years ago, the woman wears thick dark braids, bound in ribbon, hanging down to her waist. They cannot be natural.

Reading the flicker of Eleanor’s eyes, her grandmother reaches up and touches her braids.

“One of the kitchen girls died last week. Her parents let me have the hair.” After a pause in which Eleanor tries to hide her disgust, the old woman adds, “I paid them handsomely for it.”

Her grandmother, Dangereuse, was once the most beautiful woman of her day—striking enough to draw the eye of William the Troubador, Eleanor’s grandfather, away from his wife. It still feels strange that her father’s father once took her mother’s mother as a lover. In fact, Dangereuse was the one who eventually convinced the duke to arrange the marriage of Eleanor's father to Eleanor's mother, a discovery that has always felt to Eleanor like a dark charm encircling her existence.

“Come in and sit.”

She finds herself unable to resist her grandmother’s request. As she sits, she notices the shine of two small brass dishes, one in front of her grandmother and one in front of her. On each dish is a small round piece of mud-red meat. The acrid smells of vinegar and iron waft up.

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Her grandmother picks up a small, two-pronged fork, stabs the piece of meat and holds it up, indicating that Eleanor should do the same. Despite the fact that she hasn’t been able to stomach meat during her third pregnancy, she picks up the small fork next to her plate. She can see now in the candlelight that what she has on the end of her tines is a small, raw heart.

“Pigeon,” smiles her grandmother. Her teeth seem to have rotted to sharp brown points which now close around the small heart. As her lips close, a peaceful look falls over the old woman’s face. A draft slides through the room and her pale skin seems to flush in the rising flicker of the flame. Dangereuse lifts a cloth to her lips. When she lays it down, Eleanor can see a scarlet bloom on the fabric.

Eleanor hesitates.

“It will be good for the baby,” exhorts the older woman, nodding at the heart now trembling in Eleanor’s uncertain hand. “She craves it.”

A girl? Not another girl. Margaret and Alix mean nothing to her husband. She cannot bear the idea of being forced, yet again, to breed with Louis like a mare. Only a male heir will settle all that, and then she will never have to touch Louis again.

“You told me this would guarantee a son.”

“I told you no such thing.”

“You said that if I did this, I would never have to bear Louis another child.”

A strange smile crept across the old woman’s face—her lips redder than before.

“That remains true.”

She knows that Dangereuse de L’Isle Bouchard has predicted many things, among them the fall of Edessa. The woman has been rumored to cure seemingly uncurable diseases and people in court have whispered of spells. If something unholy can help Eleanor, she isn’t going to refuse it. After all, what has holiness given her other than a vicious war and another pregnancy orchestrated by the Bishop of Rome?

She places the heart into her mouth and bites down. The taste of blood and vinegar fills her mouth. At that moment a draft blows out the three candles. The moment before the darkness falls, she sees in her grandmother's face a look that is not quite joy but something more like triumph.

In the dark, she hears her grandmother’s heavy breathing slow and resolve into a kind humming that begins to sound like buzzing flies. The noise fills the air until it becomes nearly unbearable. A putrid, suffocating smell like stale breath rises up to her nose as she swallows. Her head becomes dizzy and she cannot tell the darkness of the room from the darkness coming over her as she slips into unconsciousness. Something soft brushes against her cheek. The last thing she remembers is hearing a terrible knocking at the door and a voice begging her to open.