"Well, what is it that you fight for?" Hollie scratched the back of his neck thoughtfully. "Good question. Me and Nat were never fussy whose gold we took, back in the day, so long as it was forthcoming. Ask me a week ago, and I'd have said we was both in it for the money." He was eyeing the last of Sarah's good bread thoughtfully, and Luce pushed it over. "And now?" he prompted. "Now?" The redhead gave a slow, cold smile. "Vengeance, brat. Sheer bloody vengeance." October 1642 When idealistic young poet Luce Pettitt volunteers as a junior officer in the Army of Parliament, he expects to take up arms in the noble cause of liberty against the tyrant King, Charles I. What he takes up instead is a post with a scruffy ex-mercenary who couldn't care less which side he's fighting for, so long as he gets paid, and an equally disenchanted cavalry troop. Captain Hollie Babbitt doesn't expect the world to do him any favours, based on previous bitter experience. He's lost everything once already - his wife, his good name, his career, his hope. He doesn't expect to regain it, in a war that he doesn't care about, with comrades he doesn't want. All he's got against the might of the King's Army is a posh poet, a bad-tempered horse, and a troop made up of every rebel, dissenter and horse-thief the rest of the Army didn't want. And his best friend, the charming ruffian Rackhay, whose covered Hollie's back since they were both sixteen years old and brawling in the Low Countries. Dame Fortune isn't done with Hollie Babbitt yet, not by a long chalk. But he's got nothing else to lose... has he?