The Broken Banner

A Cross of the Fallen Prequel Novel

France, 1090s.

Twelve-year-old Antoine of Saint-Vrain has grown up on stories of knights, honor, and the men whose names survive long after their deaths. More than anything, he wants to become one of them.

Then Renaud de Brécy arrives.

Wounded, disgraced, and stripped of his colors, Renaud is everything Antoine believes a knight should be: fearless with a sword, hardened by betrayal, and willing to act when weaker men hesitate. When Renaud begins training Antoine and the other boys of Saint-Vrain, Antoine finally feels what he has secretly wanted for years.

Chosen.

But beyond Saint-Vrain's fields, the death of a neighboring lord has left Valcour divided between two rival claimants. Hugues possesses the stronger legal right. Raoul possesses the loyalty of many of the people already living beneath that law. As debts, old suspicions, armed retainers, and buried secrets pull both sides toward violence, Saint-Vrain is slowly drawn into a conflict its people never asked for.

And Renaud knows more about the past than he has admitted.

A sealed letter hidden beneath Antoine's floor becomes the beginning of a chain of lies, divided loyalties, and choices whose consequences reach far beyond one frightened boy. As Antoine struggles between the man he admires and the father whose quieter example he has never fully understood, he begins to discover that courage and honor are not always the same thing.

His friendship with Martin begins to fracture. Innocent people pay for decisions made by men far above them. And every new attempt to determine who is right reveals another uncomfortable truth:

No claim is completely innocent.

No man carries the whole blame.

And a good reason can still lead someone toward a terrible choice.

As Saint-Vrain is pushed toward war, Antoine must decide whether honor means doing what stronger men call necessary, or accepting responsibility even when the truth costs him everything he hoped to become.

The Broken Banner is a character-driven medieval historical novel about boyhood, brotherhood, faith, law, ambition, conscience, and the dangerous hunger to be admired. Set in France on the eve of the First Crusade, it is the prequel to the Cross of the Fallen saga and the story of how Antoine first learns that a man's true banner is not the one carried above him, but the conscience he refuses to surrender.

The Broken Banner

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