'I've met good men and good women, as you'll no doubt hear. I learned some goodness in a hard school. I've done more than my share of evil, though I repent it, and hope through the risen Christ to come yet to God's kingdom. I had some good guides on the road to knighthood--aye, knighthood, although I started on that road as a slave. It seems so long ago that I remember that boy as someone else.' After the defeat of a local warlord during Queen Elizabeth's bloody campaigns in Ireland, a young Irish boy is taken as a slave and brought up in the household of the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth. A fine-featured and biddable lad, the young horseboy is popular in the stables and kitchens, but when one of the household's professional tournament fighters is killed in an accident in the tiltyard as an important pageant is approaching, Irish John gets the chance to become more than just a servant. As the only one who fits Black Richard's outsize armour and with his uncanny skill with even the most unruly of the heavy chargers, John learns to tilt, to fight at the barriers, to wield all the weapons of chivalry in front of a crowd - and to lose with style.Until the day one of his opponents takes one too many liberties with the scullery maid John is sweet on, and suddenly he has a real fight, with life and death in the balance, on his hands. Once bloodied, he begins an epic journey following Leicester on his military campaigns in Ireland, Scotland, Flanders and France -- a true pageant of blood, horror and heroism that will see the chivalric ideals of Le Morte D'Arthur tested against the brutal realities of Elizabeth's imperial ambitions.