PROLOGUE England April 1166 “I shall have her murdered!” the queen raged. The long, pointed edges of her sleeves brushed the stone floor, flowing and sweeping as she stalked across the solar. “When I find that woman who tempts my husband from my side, ’twill be her bitter end!” Judith of Kentworth, Lady of Lilyfare, did not flinch at her mistress’s fury. It was not the first time she’d seen Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of England and wife of Henry the Plantagenet, boiling with anger. Nay, she did not flinch or skulk or hide from the queen’s wrath as the maids and even some of the more spineless ladies did. She listened sympathetically, as a confidante and friend would do, for there were few whom the queen could truly count as both. “I will have her banished,” seethed the queen. “Or married to a coarse Welshman and sent off to the mountains.” “But my lady, your highness, surely no man would be tempted from the side of a woman as beautiful and wealthy as yourself,” ventured Lady Amice from the silk cassock on which she perched, edging as far from the raging queen as possible. Judith barely kept from rolling her eyes. She would have turned on the boulder-headed Amice herself, but the queen, in as fine a fettle as Judith had ever seen her, was already