HOLDING THE GATE: Book Two

The city is taken. Holding it is another war entirely.Four years after Ceuta's fall, Portugal's garrison still cannot feed itself, classify the people it rules, or agree on what it actually owns. A captive interpreter becomes indispensable and dangerous in equal measure. A disputed household's papers sit in a locked room, their rightful owner unknown and unknowable. A young captain's reckless glory nearly costs the garrison everything it has left to lose. And the clerk who once believed his records could stay clean of the violence around him is finally forced to answer for the one lie he told to protect a truth he thought worth the risk - a falsification that returns, three years later, at the exact moment the city can least afford to lose him.When the King of Granada's army finally arrives at Ceuta's walls in 1419, the siege that follows is broken not by the relief fleet racing to save the city, but by the governor who refuses to wait for it.Holding the Gate completes the story begun in The First Gate - a novel about what a conquest actually costs once the fighting stops and the accounting begins.