Lion

Hattin was only the beginning.

Godric Saint-Omer de Montfaucon is a Knight of the Temple's elite Black Guard, a seasoned warrior and commander known among his brothers as the Black Lion. At twenty-seven, he has survived battles that killed better men and built his life upon discipline, loyalty, and an absolute confidence in his own ability to prevail.

Then the army of Jerusalem is destroyed at Hattin.

In the desperate days that follow, Godric is captured at Acre and carried far from the Holy Land into a world where the familiar lines between Christian and Muslim, ally and enemy, duty and conscience are no longer so easily drawn.

But captivity cannot make him less a Templar.

Stripped of his freedom and nearly everything else, Godric survives by the qualities that have always defined him-and discovers strengths he never knew he possessed. His escape will set in motion events that draw him ever deeper into the struggle for the East, where kings, Caliphs and Sultans contend for power and the fate of Jerusalem hangs in the balance.

Along the way, Godric will fight beside men he once would have called enemies, stand against men others would call allies, and learn that loyalty can demand far more than obedience.

Yet through it all, he remains what he has always been: a Knight of the Temple.

And the trials that should have destroyed him will instead forge him into something the Order has never known-the Black Lion, Sword of the Templars.

LION is the first novel in the Covenant of Kings trilogy, an epic journey through the age of the Third Crusade, following one Templar Knight from the catastrophe at Hattin to the struggle for Acre.