The Bastard of Taylor's End
From Jack Chase, author of Made in America and Violent Crimes, comes a sweeping tale of rebellion, forbidden love, court intrigue, and dark forces stirring beneath a kingdom on the brink.
Raised beneath a cruel monarchy, Jamie Campbell is a bastard peasant marked for death after the King's Watch executes his guardian. Fleeing into the wilderness, he falls in with the Black Rider, a disgraced knight turned masked mercenary who strips him down and reforges him in war and deception. Far to the north, the remnants of a shattered rebellion still smolder. Scottish lord Henry Beverley surrenders his daughter, Margaret, to the Crown in marriage to King Lionel Taylor, while her brother, Peter "Mad Peter" Beverley, escapes the slaughter. He and his rogue militia become all that remain of the Scottish army-a living threat, a blood debt unresolved.
When Jamie learns his lover, Lillian Spires, has been enslaved by the Crown, he and the Black Rider infiltrate the royal court disguised as members of a traveling theatre troupe. King Lionel clings to power through paranoia and bloodshed, but true authority rests with Prince Damien Taylor, the "Black Prince," whose calculated cruelty sustains the crown as much as it corrodes it.
Living under a false name, Jamie is drawn into palace intrigue-and into a forbidden romance with Margaret Beverley, the captive Scottish princess promised to the king. As her brother marches south to reclaim her and destroy the Taylor dynasty, pressure closes around the castle from every direction-including from within. 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.
The Bastard of Taylor's End is a sprawling historical fantasy of masked mercenaries, royal conspiracies, forbidden romance, rebellion, and revenge-where theatre becomes espionage, love becomes treason, and the fate of a kingdom may rest with the bastard nobody expected to survive.
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