When Lady Aude encounters Eleanor of Aquitaine on the wharfs of Antioch, the queen is on crusade but Aude is returning home. The daughter of a French crusader and an Armenian noble, Aude grew up on an estate outside of Jerusalem. To earn her place in the queen's entourage, Aude begins to tell her own story, how violence and an ill-fated marriage forced her to leave the land of her birth and how she vowed to return almost three decades later. Across those years, from the Holy Land to Flanders and beyond, she witnessed political upheaval and only slowly began to wrest control over her own life. While Aude weaves her tale, events unfold around the queen and her companions, and Eleanor is caught in her own version of an unhappy marriage that will have its own dramatic personal and political repercussions. ✠ Drawing on her rich knowledge of the medieval world, Lucy Pick offers The Queen's Companion not as a sequel to her novel Pilgrimage but an intersection with it. Aude was a small player in Pilgrimage who takes center stage in this novel, bringing to life those turbulent times and the ways women worked together within the social and political realities of their day.
