A Suit of Swords

Hollie forgot that he was supposed to be big and clumsy and slid through the jostling bodies as there was a shattering clatter of breaking pottery.
Lynten sprawling in the ashes with her cap askew and her tray spilled, and the laces of her bodices cut through, all her linen showing and a thin line of blood where a man's knife-point had scored through her shift and torn her poor flesh beneath, trying to cover her plump bare breasts with inadequate hands -
"Hey," Hollie said mildly, "that's not nice. Don't do it."

And the man with the knife turned, thinking to give the gawky Englishman a second smile, and all his mates jeered and clapped, standing clear so that the hearth was as bare as an arena.

Amsterdam, Christmas 1626

It has been a year of wonders for Lancashire Puritan's brat Holofernes Babbitt. Run away to the Low Countries at the age of eighteen to take up a career as a mercenary soldier in the Imperial Army, so far Hollie's luck has held. Or at least, he's still alive.

Homeless, friendless, and broke till the spring's campaigning starts again, it looks as if it may be a bleak Christmas for Hollie, after the promise of the spring.

But miracles happen, at the midwinter of the year...

A prequel to the bestselling Uncivil Wars series by the same author - one of a series of tales of Hollie Babbitt's wild young mercenary days in the Thirty Years' War.