For one Norman knight, Sir Robert Alain de Bellencombre—Alain, as he prefers to be called—the struggle for peace did not end at the coastal hamlet of Hastings. Alain must battle his Saxon bride's shapeshifter-empowered kinsman, Ulfric, who has conceived a plan to restore England to Saxon rule . . . with Ulfric wearing the crown, of course.

Lady Kendra, Alain's Saxon bride-to-be, must fight to reconcile the vow to seek happiness, which she made to her dying brother, believed to have been mortally wounded by a Norman knight weeks after the Battle of Hastings, with the vow she uttered over her brother's corpse to never marry a countryman of the knight who caused his death "unless it snows in July." Her heart proclaims the handsome, courtly and courageous Alain as the man with whom she can be truly happy, but her fierce loyalty to her beloved brother's memory rejects Alain's Norman heritage.

When Kendra's miraculous healing gift awakens, and she becomes ensnared in Ulfric's bid for the throne, Kendra and Alain's battle for peace—internal as well as external—takes on a depth and poignancy neither of them believed possible...or winnable.