King of the Middle March
by Kevin Crossley-Holland
Arthur de Caldicot waits eagerly in Venice for the start of the Fourth Crusade. But it's now when Arthur's future should be clearest that he feels the most doubt. Jealousies and greed rive the Crusade, leading him to question its true mission. Back in England, his engagement to Winnie remains uncertain, while his search for his birth mother has been stymied by his vicious father. And his seeing stone shows him the last days of King Arthur's court—a great dream destroyed, but also a glorious legend rising from the ruins. Likewise in this book, Arthur becomes a man worthy of his kingly name.

Excerpt:
When we reached the Doge's camp, the vermilion tent and the smaller pavilions surrounding it and the slimy steps down to the water were seething with servants and cooks and monks and vinters and falconers and blacksmiths and people hoping for an audience with the Doge, and I don't know whom else. I listened to a man practicing the wheedling bagpipes; then two Black monks told me about the Rule of Saint Benedict, and I told them I knew about how Saint Maurus walked on the water. Simona and I talked to a surgeon called Taddeo, who told me the gut of a cat stretches for one hundred paces, and the worst way of dying is to be hanged and drawn and quartered, and once he trepanned a man whose blood was blue.



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