Solomon's Crown: A Novel

by Natasha Siegel

Genres: Medieval; Historical Romance

Synopsis

“Absolutely captivating and wonderfully romantic . . . I didn’t want to put this book down, even when it had ended.”—Rainbow Rowell, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Simon Snow Trilogy

“These two kings will wreck your heart.”—Heather Walter, author of Malice

Two destined rivals fall desperately in love—but the fate of medieval Europe hangs in the balance.

Twelfth-century Europe. Newly crowned King Philip of France is determined to restore his nation to its former empire and bring glory to his name. But when his greatest enemy, King Henry of England, threatens to end his reign before it can even begin, Philip is forced to make a precarious alliance with Henry’s volatile son—risking both his throne, and his heart.

Richard, Duke of Aquitaine, never thought he would be king. But when an unexpected tragedy makes him heir to England’s royal seat, he finally has an opportunity to overthrow the father he despises. At first, Philip is a useful tool in his quest for vengeance . . . until passion and politics collide, and Richard begins to question whether the crown is worth the cost.

When Philip and Richard find themselves staring down an impending war, they must choose between their desire for each other and their grand ambitions. Will their love prevail if it calls to them from across the battlefield? Teeming with royal intrigue and betrayal, this epic romance reimagines two real-life kings ensnared by an impossible choice: Follow their hearts, or earn their place in history.

 

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Release date: March 14, 2023

Publisher: Dell

Print pages: 354

Sample

Prologue

Richard

 

ine was an easy birth. It was a birth my mother would later tell me was fit for glory, fit for a prince. I was born early, as swift and as keen as a sword. My mother lay down to deliver and I emerged three hours later. The moment I had air in my lungs I screamed and I screamed, and I kept screaming until the entire court was raw with it. I was the sixth child, the second son still living. I had no right to cry with the entitlement that I did. But I did. I wailed as if the weight of the crown was already upon my head.

It was not so with Philip. Philip was born in high summer, just outside of Paris. His mother must have broiled in the birthing chamber as she awaited him, swaddled in sweat-soaked linens, the sun beating at the warped glass of the windows with impatient fists. Eight hours into the ordeal, she was rolled in a blanket, lifted off the bed, and tossed from side to side in a desperate attempt to draw him out. When he was finally tugged into the world, slippery and pale and silent, it took the frantic hands of a physician to rouse him. Even afterwards—or so he described it to me—his voice was thin and reedy, his breaths uneven, and his parents feared he would not survive the winter. But still, it was enough. Philip was no warrior, but something greater. He was a boy, as his father had wished four times before: a first son. One day, he would be king.

Church bells tolled for the entire week; people danced in the streets; France sang his praises to the heavens themselves. “Philip the God-given” he was called. I can only imagine how my father must have laughed at this, ruling from his throne in England, with three princes already to his name. I was with my mother at the time. But I remember her sitting with me, petting my head and murmuring into my ear. She often repeated these words as I grew older:

“Richard,” she told me, “although this child may become a king and you will not, you must never forget who you are. You are the grandson of an empress, the son of the king of England, and the future Duke of Aquitaine. You yield to no man.”

I told Philip what she had said, years later. In hindsight, I doubt he believed me. But the way he smiled when I recounted it, his fingers curled around my wrist, my lips over the shell of his ear—our little secret, Philip—I like to think that he wanted it to be true. It hadn’t mattered, not really. Nothing had mattered, with a pair of thrones between us, and my heart clutched like a rosary between his hands. 

 

Chapter 1

Phillip

A

t thirteen years old, I almost died.

I had gone riding with the court and ventured out too far. The forests outside of Paris are lovely in the spring, carpeted with bluebells, sunlight weaving between the oaks; but as night fell that day, and the clouds roiled, the trees became a labyrinth of clawing fingers. Stumbling between them, the flowers tugged at my feet, pulling me into the mud. I could do little but sit curled-up amongst the roots of a wizened beech, praying I would survive the storm. I remained lost in the darkness with only the torrential rain to keep me company; and when they found me in the morning I was coughing and shivering, clinging to consciousness.

I was only half formed at that age, and the sickness came quickly. I was laid out upon my bed, flushed and trembling, sprawled like a prisoner on the rack. I spent most of my childhood swaddled in luxuries—furs, tutors, vellum—but when I think of my youth, the first thing I remember is the tang of my sweat in the air, my mother digging her nails into my forearm as she chanted prayers, the bitter taste of herbs and the fog of fever.

I made the perfect picture of a martyr. Outside the wind shrieked and rattled at the windows in zealous accusation; the foundations of the castle groaned with me. Physicians came and went like visiting pilgrims. They bled me until my pallor became corpselike, and they argued incessantly over courses of treatment; they all wanted to be the one to save the life of a future king. One recommended my head be shaved; another thought I ought to be as warm as possible, to draw the fever out; and a third, hardly a doctor at all, loomed over me murmuring in funereal Latin. In my delirium, the layer of sweat on my skin became a horde of insects. I scratched and clawed at myself, scoring scarlet lines over my arms. I was slathered in a paste of stinking moss, which soon dried to a thick green crust. I must have looked like a leper.

My father never once came to my room to see me. Instead, he departed on a pilgrimage to beg God for my recovery. Of all places, he went to a shrine in England. He was aging and infirm, but still, he went. He was never the same when he came back, remaining silent for hours upon hours. I think the strain of the journey pushed his addled mind a step too far. And yet it worked; by the time he returned, I had improved. Whether by grace of God or blind luck, my fever broke. I awoke one morning frail, half starved, but blessedly alive.

It took another week before I could leave the bed. I had lost so much weight it was almost comical; when I walked, I wobbled awkwardly, like a dancing bear. I should have been relieved, but the world I returned to seemed dull and underwhelming. The experience left me bone-weary and afraid. It felt as if time distended around me, and I aged years in the weeks I had been away.

I went to visit my father soon after my bedrest ended. He had been taking private Mass ever since his homecoming. When I first saw him, I wondered if he had been eating nothing but communion bread; his wrists were even leaner than mine, his bones bursting from their skin. The fire in his chamber had been stoked to heaving, and the scent of the smoke mingled with incense. The dim light cast his cheekbones into disturbing relief. His breaths were so shallow they seemed entirely absent; only the languid, occasional movements of his eyelashes were proof of his living. I watched him from the doorway, unable to step into the room. But he soon noticed my presence, and he outstretched his hand to greet me, fingers trembling.

I knelt before him to receive his blessing.

“My son,” he said, and I rose. He was sitting in his wooden chair, the one with wide, high arms that forced his shoulders beside his ears. He was clutching a cup of wine in his other hand, and I could see the liquid quivering in his grasp. I had to stoop to look him in the eye.

“Father,” I said. “Are you well?”

“I am well,” he replied, perhaps believing it, “and you are well also

so. Praise be to God.”

“Praise be.”

“My son—”

“Yes, father?” I asked.

“You must give thanks, Philip. Give thanks to God.”

“I shall,” I replied. “I have.”

As much as I wish it were different, this is what I remember most about my father: how desperately he clung to his saints and his epistles, like a hanged man scrabbling at the noose. Louis the Monk, some called him. I saw more of his back as he knelt to pray than I ever did the front of him. When I was very young, I idolized him, fancying him a someday-saint. As I spoke to him, I would imagine the relics his bones would make. That evening he whispered to me in the soft rasp of a dying man, and all I could do was stare at his skeletal fingers, imagining them shut in a reliquary box.

“You are a good boy, Philip,” he said, offering me a faint, papery smile. “No, not a boy. You are a man. My son.” He dropped his wine to the floor—the warm liquid splashed the front of my slippers—and he surged forward, grasping my hands with sudden strength. “You will be king, soon enough,” he told me.

“Father—”

“We have no choice. You know as well as I.”

“Know what, Father?”

“We must—” His grasp became more insistent, his upper lip curling back to reveal a row of shrunken gum. “We must— I am not as I was. Our lands are not as they were. England has diminished us.”

“England,” I echoed. I imagined England as an enormous, gaping maw, making its slow, interminable gulp towards us: closing its teeth around the entire continent, Calais to the Pyrenees. “What shall we do?”

“You must be crowned.”

When I thought of kings, I thought of the man sitting before me. I wanted nothing less than to become as he was. Louis was only a half person. The soul was gone, and the rest was skin and muscle and bone.

I could do nothing except kneel and bow my head in expectation of his blessing. He did not bless me. Instead he stooped over, clutching my head in his hands. His eyes were welling with tears. He had black eyes, glazed matte, like ink. My own were blue and glasslike, and I had spent years learning to lower my lids, knowing their transparency; but at that age—surely, Louis must have seen how afraid I was. He pressed his thumbs into my cheekbones. His grip was weak, but his fingers seemed to thre

aten some sudden surge of strength, to press my skull so tightly it might rupture into shards. I was trapped there, on the floor of his chamber, with the roar of the fire behind me.

“My son,” he said. He closed in, pressing his forehead against my own. “You are already a king.”

“I am?” I asked.

“You are. What makes a monarch, Philip?”

“Blood.”

“Blood,” he said, satisfied. “Royal blood. My blood. With it, you will become a great king. A pious king. A new Augustus.”

“I shall try, Father.”

“You were born for this. Remember that.”

Louis withdrew. He reached down to take the cup from the floor, cradling it in his palms. His gaze skittered across me, and he peered into the empty cup, frowning.

“Shall I give you leave?” I asked, still on my knees.

“Yes,” he murmured. “I have need of more wine. Fetch some wine, boy. Fetch Eleanor.”

Eleanor was his first wife. He was now on his third.

I stood. He did not look at me as I left him there, hunched and vacant, clutching his cup, in the same position as when I’d arrived.

***

The year passed. Medicine holds that those who are cold and dry in the body are melancholic, an affliction I was treated for numerous times during my childhood. The physicians would placate my parents by listing all the great leaders of history who suffered a similar malady: Charlemagne and Julius Caesar both had such temperaments, they would say, as they ground me pastes of astringent herbs to swallow each morning. Silent and sullen, I spent evenings wrapped in coarse wool to promote heat. I was served only foods deemed warm and wet: meaty stews, fennel-seed teas, wine spiced with sage.

Nothing helped, and the months after my illness, my melancholy grew more and more pronounced. Cinnamon is worth its weight in gold, and yet it became a daily medicine. It coated every bite of food I took. My tongue became thick with it. My little sister Agnes was light and merry, she ran hot. She spun around the corridors like silk on a loom. Every day we met in the same hall on the way to Mass. “Have you had a good morning, Philip?” she would ask me.

“My morning was good if yours was, Agnes,” I would respond.

“Then mine was the best morning in the world.”

She would laugh and grasp my arm. And when she did, I would always have the same hope: that perhaps some of that heat would run from her hand and into my blood.

It never did. I began hiding in the library as much as I could, taking comfort amongst pages that whispered to me of distant pasts, of kings and nations that did not know of me and never would. My mother would have to come fetch me before supper, and in the doorway of the great hall she would remind me to smile to the vassals, to finish the food on my plate. “Otherwise, they will think something is troubling you,” she’d say, leaning forward, so I could smell the chapel incense her confessor favored. She always smelled like a confessional; she bore the guilt of something I would never know, guilt enough that after my father’s death she retreated to a convent and we never spoke again. Our interactions were limited to these moments of criticism, when she instructed my behavior, using her thumbs to push at the corners of my lips. “Smile, Philip,” she would say. “Why must you look so sad?”

I was always asked to be happy, even as everything around me emphasized the virtues of suffering. Monks flagellated themselves into woodcuts, stripping themselves raw before God. The Tragedies instructed me to count no man happy before he was dead. I asked my confessor whether there was wisdom in these words. He said to me, “You are not yet a man, Philip. You are young. Be joyous in

your youth.” Was I expected to be happy now, knowing that someday I was destined for sorrow? “Yes,” he replied, as if that made perfect sense and I was simply too young to understand why.

But the more I understood of my position, the expectations upon me, the scarcer that hope became. It was the map that haunted me most, hung above the desk of my tutor’s rooms. There was shown the hollowing of France, in great strokes of red ink: all the land once ours, snatched with hungry hands by England during my father’s reign. It was the fruit of his folly, a pair of shackles waiting to descend. My lifetime would be spent redeeming his lifetime of surrender, and no amount of cinnamon could change that.

***

I was crowned less than a year after my illness. It was a dry month, a cold month, a melancholy month. There was very little rain, but the air was abrasive with frost. I knelt at the altar of the church, hearing the dry, cold wind whistle outside, feeling the dry, cold click of my throat as I swallowed. There were so many people, lost in the pile of faces and expensive fabrics. My father, barely sensate, was propped up at the front row. He had not spoken in weeks. My mother sat beside him, her fair hair piled heavily at her neck, bowing her head as if the weight were too much. The archbishop struggled to keep balance in his towering hat. Behind my parents stood the king of England, Henry, watching me. He was tall, colorfully dressed, a vivid stain on the crowd. His gaze was like a bowstring pulled taut. I wonder what he thought of me, calf of a prince that I was, struggling to wrangle my hand from my sleeve.

The archbishop swiped too much oil upon my face as he anointed me, and I went cross-eyed watching it drip off my nose. Then came the prayers and the hymns, and meanwhile I gripped my scepter so tightly that my knuckles went white. Even inside, the chill was such that the tips of my ears went pink beneath the crown. By the time it was all finished, I felt entirely numb, and it hardly registered when the archbishop presented me to my subjects. I stood and raised my eyes to the vaulted ceiling, rather than return the attention of my audience.

There was a feast afterwards, of course, in honor of a monarch who resented his own throne. The frigid air was inescapable, the light faded to a frozen twilight, and the rushes on the floor had been stamped thin by the crowd. I was sat next to the king of England. He stared at me and chewed thoughtfully, while I fiddled with my cutlery.

“We have much to speak of, you and I,” he said to me. He had a small chunk of bread in his hand. As he spoke, he began to pick at its crust, causing flakes of it to fall upon his plate. He was a handsome man, carrying his age well; tanned, wide-shouldered, with an impressive head of red-blond hair.

I nodded, and he smiled. Frowning, I looked away from him to spear a parsnip with my knife.

“We could be friends, Philip,” he said, as I pushed the vegetable around my plate. I disliked the sound of my name in his mouth. I had to force myself not to flinch.

“I am glad if that is true,” I replied.

He laughed at that, and he returned the bread to his plate. The weight of several curious glances fell upon us, but a cursory conversation within the hall continued, granting us an un

convincing illusion of privacy. On the opposite side of the table, the Count of Blois had no such compunctions. The count had always been one of my father’s most troublesome vassals; he had no more respect for my authority than he had Louis’s, it seemed, and he was glowering at me as if I had offered Henry my kingdom along with his meal.

“You are skeptical of my intentions,” Henry said, glancing between myself and Blois with open amusement.

I put down my own knife. “My father has fought with you for decades.”

“Your father was angry at me for stealing Eleanor. Surely you do not suffer the same jealousies?”

Henry had married my father’s first wife after their divorce, and Louis had always been bitter; but this was a ridiculous claim. A facile attempt at manipulation, even if directed at someone so young. I said, affronted, “You have stolen our land. It is hardly a matter of jealousy.”

He raised a brow. “You are bold, Philip. We are allies, are we not?”

“Yes. But only when we must be.”

He smiled again. His face was deceptively expressive, a sort of false openness that invited complacency. “I thought you your father’s son,” he said. “You seem now to be little alike.”

“Fathers and sons often differ.”

The grin grew strained. “Sometimes. My sons and I are reconciled.”

“Of course, my lord,” I said.

“With no thanks to France, who funded their rebellion.”

I ate the parsnip, chewing it to the point of disintegration, giving myself time to consider. “Would you have done differently?” I asked finally. “Than what my father did, I mean?”

“No,” he replied. “But you are king now, Philip. And it is you who must accept the consequences of his actions.”

“How so?”

“My sons were content, until your father taught them otherwise,” Henry told me. There was no grief for their betrayal, in the cynical press of his lips—a whisper of a grimace, nothing more. He continued, “My second son, Richard, has lands upon your border. Aquitaine, greater in size than France itself.”

“I know,” I replied, frowning.

“It should trouble you. Have you not wondered where he is? He is a powerful lord. Should he not be at your coronation?”

“Yes, he should.”

“But he is not,” Henry said. “He is quarrelsome. He will not bow to you

Your father has fueled his discontent, and now we both must pay for it.”

“It is no concern of mine if you quarrel with your son.”

“It should be. Think of this as a warning, Philip. We both have land he might wish to claim. Which of us is the easier target?”

I shrugged. Henry’s words were empty, we both knew that. It was him who cast his shadow across the Channel, even if it was Richard’s land upon my western border. There would never be a genuine alliance between France and England, not as long as their rulers had heads on their shoulders and armies to lead. There was an ancient elm which stood directly upon the border, Normandy to its north, Vexin to its south; its neighbors’ kings had met beneath its branches many times, and not once had they brokered a lasting peace. Our hostility had deep roots. The fickleness of princes did not change that.

And still, I thought, what threat could Richard truly pose? A prince who could not be bothered to make an appearance at a king’s coronation, who allowed his father to speak ill of him unheeded; he seemed to me a foolish sort of man, to be so flippant with his reputation. But I knew I could not say this to Henry without seeming hopelessly naïve. Instead I simply sat there, little king, clutching my knife in my fist. I smiled thinly at him, widening my eyes in an affectation of innocence. “Thank you for the advice,” I finally managed. It was something of a surrender, and he looked pleased.

Henry could be forgiven his smugness, sat beside a fourteen-year-old boy in his too-big crown. How ridiculous we must have looked to the others at the table, kings in contrast. What makes a monarch? I thought to myself, seeking comfort in the words, repeating them like a psalm. Blood makes a monarch. There is glory in my veins.

It is these words that have sustained me in the years that have followed. It has always held true; all kings bleed the same. Our family trees are as tangled and thorny as a briar patch. King of England, king of France; a pair of thrones in a tapestry of genealogies. It is impossible to unpick one thread without the entire thing coming apart. But on that day, as Henry sneered at me, the seed of a defiant idea found soil.

I could pick at those threads. I could cause the tapestry to unravel, and remake it in my own image.

I would let the map haunt me no longer. I would be a wise king, a great king. I would be a new Augustus.

Blood makes a monarch, I thought. But glory is earned.

Chapter 2

Richard

W

hen I was fifteen, I went to war.

Even at that age, battle was a joy. On the field, I felt a leviathan, all of those around me clinging to my ankles as I marched forward; sometimes they felt like weights around my feet, there to prevent me from striding. But the sense of magnitude I gained was worth the struggle, and so I fought not only willingly, but gladly, ravenous and unafraid. It was a rebellion against my father, waged alongside my brothers and the king of France. We demanded more power, more autonomy, more land. In truth, I cared little for the terms of our victory. That was my brothers’ concern. They fought the battle for the battle’s end. None of them knew the joy of it, as I did. No one else craved it.

What a sight I must have made, at the apex of my pride, unmarred by surrender. I had grown fast, I was taller and stronger and more furious than I had any right to be, more of a king than the king of England himself—and I wanted everything to be louder, faster, greater than what my father had. I wore livery in gold brighter than the sun. I drank wine from silver pitchers. I would dream of the swing of a sword; I spent all my waking hours listening for the song of it in the air. I found minstrels whose drums sounded like the march of infantry, men who sang ballads and built me into a legend, stone upon stone, battle upon battle, until everyone in France and England knew my name.

And yet we were losing. By the summer of that year, our surrender seemed almost assured. I found myself spending more time in the library than on the battlefield. It was an awful place, that French library, with its stink of vellum and moldy leather. King Louis would watch with an acerbic expression as I argued with my brother Geoffrey, who was younger than I and yet insisted on speaking to me as if I were a child. Meanwhile, Harry, the eldest of us, was as insipid as he ever was. He would lounge on a bench and do absolutely nothing productive, drumming his fingers on his thigh, his too-tight doublet warping over his chest. Really, who could be surprised that we lost? Too much time stabbing at maps and snapping at one another, and the English troops had us routed. We were left humiliated, forced to answer to a father who despised us, and who we despised in turn.

I might have tolerated surrender, even then. But our mother, who had supported the revolt, was imprisoned. This was the greatest blow of all. I had spent my childhood with her in Aquitaine, while my brothers and father remained in England. She had raised me, and her sudden removal from my life felt nothing less than an evisceration. My disappointment shifted to grief, and then to fury. I returned to my duchy, bruised and baying for retribution, but revenge had to give way to practicality. Until opportunity came, I would have to hide, and hide I did; I remained there, in Aquitaine, out of sight of my family. It was necessary, unavoidable, but it still felt like cowardice.

I needed to distract myself from my anger and my shame. So, I turned distraction into an art form: building myself a cult of chivalry, dancing from place to place with a court of minstrels. I was a poet, a knight, a lover, but not a soldier. I could never be a soldier, not while my father kept my mother in chains. Instead, my war was one of decadence. I wanted to wield my freedom like a lance. I wanted to be admired. I wanted everyone to know the Duke of Aquitaine, in all his virtue and depravity, basking in his liberty. See how his spirit remains unbroken! See the leviathan unbound!

Still, each moment of joy was tempered by fury. Each year I spent free, my mother spent another fettered; in my imagination, my father’s image steadily grew more and more grotesque, a gargoyle peering at me from the buttresses. I wished to visit her in her confinement, but I could not stomach the thought of Henry waiting at the gates, grinning as he turned me away.

What I needed was an opportunity. I needed a chance to go to England when I knew my father would be unable to stop me. That chance came years later. Louis had given up. There was a new king in France, and Henry was unavoidably detained at the coronation. There would be no better time for it. For the first time in three years, I would see my mother again. 

***

I arrived at the fortress with only a small retinue. Our horses’ hooves squelched in the wet grass as we approached the tower. The sky was grey, the gelding I was riding the same; England was devoid of color, as it always would be, night or day, winter or spring.

I hated this place. England was my father’s country. Being there made me feel disoriented, unanchored. But I told myself seeing my mother would be worth the trip. In a family of vipers, she was the only one without venom in her bite.

I slipped off my mount, sinking into the mud, grinning at the guards upon the battlements. They stumbled about quite comically in response, baffled by my unexpected arrival. What were they to do? We all knew Henry would not want me here. But I was a prince, a duke in my own right. They could not defy me.

After several minutes of waiting, the gate was winched open. The others with me—about fifteen men in all—began to dismount. The first to approach was Stephen. His umber skin was glossed with the damp of the air, the clouds casting silver reflections on his cheeks. Now knighted, he was the highest-ranking man in the group apart from myself; the only one with the confidence to complain, ...