Historical Fiction · Standalone Novel
Blood and Faith
The Last Christian King of Jerusalem
July 4, 1187. Above the Sea of Galilee, the King of Jerusalem kneels in the dust and surrenders the True Cross. What follows is a long penance — and a refusal to die.
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About the novel
On the Horns of Hattin above the Sea of Galilee, Guy de Lusignan — King of Jerusalem by his marriage to Sibylla, sworn protector of the True Cross, last Latin sovereign of the Holy Land — kneels in the dust and surrenders to Saladin. The kingdom collapses behind him in the next ninety days. Jerusalem falls. The relic is gone. Acre, his last great seaport, opens its gates without a fight.
Blood and Faith begins the morning he refuses to die anyway.
This is the story of the king history remembers chiefly for one defeat — and of the years that came after it. Through the long siege of Acre, the broken armistice of the Third Crusade, the politics of Richard Lionheart and Conrad of Montferrat, and the founding of a new kingdom on the borrowed island of Cyprus, Guy walks back into a future no one has scripted for him. He keeps Sibylla’s kerchief knotted at his wrist. He keeps a count he no longer dares to stop. He keeps the faith that surrendered the sword.
A historical novel of war, marriage, oath-keeping, and the slow penance of a man who outlived his crown.
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Blood and Faith
“The dust tasted of blood. Guy de Lusignan walked among the dead and could not remember when the walking had begun.”
From the surrender at Hattin to the founding of the Kingdom of Cyprus, Blood and Faith is a novel about the cost of conviction — and the price of refusing to die for it.
For readers of
Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories, Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, Sharon Kay Penman’s Lionheart, and the long-arc historical novels of Hilary Mantel.