My thanks to Katharine Kerr for supplying me with a title when all seemed lost; to my husband, Jay Silverstein, for his continued support while he has himself been engaged in a great enterprise; to the Reverend Jeanne Reames Zimmerman, O.S.L., for her immense aid with matters classical and linguistic; to my sister, Dr. Ann Marie Rasmussen, whose knowledge of the medieval milieu was invaluable; to Dr. John W. Bernhardt, whose lecture on itinerant kingship in Ottonian Germany inspired the setting; and to Widukind of Corvey, monk and historian, whose History of the Saxons —made accessible to me through a translation into English by Raymund F. Wood—spoke to me across a thousand years.
Since this is a fantasy, many details borrowed from our Middle Ages —large and small—have been altered, but all mistakes are mine alone.
