The Borrowed Crown

They will call him Lord Aldrich von Falkenberg, cousin to a dying house, come home from the crusades to claim what is his.

He is none of those things. His name is Cort. He was born in a tanner's yard, learned his letters from a defrocked priest and his sword from a dying sellsword, and he has spent nineteen years watching men with soft hands and old names decide who eats and who starves. When the real Aldrich dies of fever in a Genoese port with no one but Cort to witness it, Cort takes the man's ring, his letters, and his face-that-no-one-at-home-remembers, and he walks north into the Empire to become what he was never born to be.

The house he's inherited is bankrupt, half its land mortgaged, its levy a joke, its neighbors circling. One wrong word at the wrong table and he hangs. But Cort has three things the real Aldrich never did: he can actually fight, he can actually count, and he has spent his whole life learning to read exactly what a powerful man wants to hear.

He wants a crown. He'll settle, at first, for surviving the winter.