An Imperfect Reckoning (Paperback)

He claimed her as his to keep her alive. It was the first lie between them, and the smallest.

Carcassonne, 1209. The crusade against the Cathars has already put Béziers to the sword, and now its army is camped below the walls.

Azalaïs de Carcas keeps her father's accounts and sees clearly what the men around her will not. Her Catholic house has quietly fed the heretics for three generations. Jehan Charpentier, a carpenter's son from Paris, has a gift for reading ground, and he has put it to work for the army outside.

They should be enemies. Instead each finds in the other the only person who understands how the siege works, and what grows between them is love and complicity at once. The fall of the city is where their story turns. What follows is the reckoning: what they owe each other, and what each is willing to pay.

A love story from the Cathar Crusade, about two people on opposite sides of a war who helped bring about the catastrophe they survived.

Drawn from the chronicles of the siege. A historical note at the end separates the record from the invention.