The Bronze Queen

Description

Some queens are crowned by blood. Others are remembered by what their ambition destroys.

Queen Medb of Connacht will not endure being measured as less than any man. When a prized bull becomes the only thing standing between her and equality with her husband, wounded pride becomes royal command, and royal command becomes war.

Across the sea at Dún Scáith, Scáthach receives the conflict in fragments: frightened messengers, contradictory reports, and songs already turning men into legends. Among the names carried to her hall are two former students, Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad, brothers in training now being drawn toward opposite sides of the same brutal campaign.

Scáthach cannot command the armies gathering in Ireland. She cannot call back the warriors she once trained. She can only preserve the truth while queens, kings, poets, and survivors reshape it for their own purposes.

As Medb drives her host toward Ulster and the cost of her ambition mounts, teacher and queen confront different forms of power, and the terrible price demanded when human lives become the foundation of legend.

The Bronze Queen is Book Two of The Scáthach Cycle, a mythic historical fantasy series about the women, warriors, and forgotten truths behind Ireland’s heroic traditions. It continues the story begun in Woman of Shadows.