My Coffee Pot Guest: Nancy Northcott – The King’s Champion

The Boar King’s Honour Trilogy, Book 3

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About the Book

Book Title: The King’s Champion

Series: The Boar King’s Honor Trilogy

Author: Nancy Northcott

Publication Date: May 1, 2023

Publisher: Falstaff Books

Page Length: 378

Genre: Historical fantasy with romantic
elements

The Boar
King’s Honor Trilogy

A wizard’s
misplaced trust

A king
wrongly blamed

A
bloodline cursed until they clear the king’s name.

Book 3:
The King’s Champion

Caught up in the desperate evacuation of the British
Expeditionary Force from France in the summer of 1940, photojournalist Kate
Shaw witnesses death and destruction that trigger disturbing visions. She
doesn’t believe in magic and tries to pass them off as survivor guilt or an
overactive imagination, but the increasingly intense visions force her to
accept that she is not only magically Gifted but a seer.

In Dover, she meets her distant cousin Sebastian Mainwaring,
Earl of Hawkstowe and an officer in the British Army. He’s also a seer and is
desperate to recruit her rare Gift for the war effort. The fall of France
leaves Britain standing alone as the full weight of Nazi military might
threatens. Kate’s untrained Gift flares out of control, forcing her to accept
Sebastian’s help in conquering it as her ethics compel her to use her ability
for the cause that is right.

As this fledgling wizard comes into her own, her visions
warn of an impending German invasion, Operation Sealion, which British
intelligence confirms. At the same time, desire to help Sebastian, who’s doomed
by a family curse arising from a centuries-old murder, leads Kate to a shadowy
afterworld between life and death and the trapped, fading souls who are the
roots of her family’s story. From the bloody battlefields of France to the
salons of London, Kate and Sebastian race against time to free his family’s
cursed souls and to stop an invasion that could doom the Allied cause.

The
King’s Champion concludes
Nancy’s Northcott’s exciting Boar King’s Honor Trilogy.

The Road to The End by Nancy Northcott

This
trilogy started out with a single idea, and I originally meant to write only
one book. So how did it become three? Well, things got out of hand, as things
sometimes do.

I
wanted to write a story blaming the Duke of Buckingham for the murders of the
Princes in the Tower, Edward IV’s sons and Richard III’s nephews, who were last
reported seen in the Tower of London in the fall of 1483. I thought he was the
most likely candidate—assuming the boys were murdered at all, something I think
there’s plenty of room to doubt. Regardless of one’s view on that question, a
fair number of historical novels have been written on the topic. I wanted to do
something different.

So
I started thinking of angles. The Tower of London was not only a prison. It was
also a royal residence, probably the most secure one in the realm. People going
in and out were observed by guards and workers. So how could assassins kill two
boys, bury them under a staircase, as the traditional view holds they did, and
get out but have no one see them in the act or raise a hue and cry and point
fingers afterward?

Because
I love fantasy and science fiction, an answer popped into my head—magic. So I
started on the chain of what if so familiar to writers. I put a wizard,
Edmund Mainwaring, Earl of Hawkstowe, in Buckingham’s affinity and had him,
mistakenly trusting his liege lord, help Buckingham’s agents accomplish their
murderous mission unseen.

When
Edmund learned what he had done, he threw himself on the mercy of King Richard
III. The king told him, because of the political situation, not to say anything
until the king gave him leave. But Richard III died at Bosworth Field before doing
so.

The
Tudors who followed him smeared his reputation, denied his claim to the throne,
and blamed him for the boys’ deaths. Speaking up during their reigns would’ve
cost Edmund his head. Tormented by guilt, he cursed all the heirs of his line
to not rest in life or death until they cleared the king’s name.

At
that point, I started writing The Herald of Day. I threw in altered
history to raise the story’s stakes. A wizard figures out how to travel through
time and changes the past to establish a dictatorship of the magically Gifted.
The lead characters must figure out what happened, who did it, and how to undo
it before the grim reality that results from the changes becomes permanent.
Along the way, they tried to figure out how to lift the Mainwaring curse.

I
reached the end of the book and decided that was maybe too easy. A friend
suggested making the book the first of a trilogy with the curse storyline
running through it. The more I thought about that, the more I liked the idea. I
needed something with high stakes for the main plots in the next two books,
though. I finally hit on Napoleon’s escape from Elba and the Battle of Waterloo
for the second book, The Steel Rose, and the Battle of Britain and
Operation Sealion for The King’s Champion. These two books have
different lead characters, but two of the main characters from The Herald of
Day, Richard and Miranda Mainwaring, the Earl and Countess of Hawkstowe,
appear in prominent supporting roles as ghosts in both of these later books.

Because
the lead characters from The Steel Rose aren’t cursed, they don’t play a
role after their book. Nor do they have any part in The Herald of Day, which
is set 131 years before The Steel Rose. Since The King’s Champion
is the final book and occurs 125 years after The Steel Rose, the lead
characters in The King’s Champion appear only in their book.

Richard
and Miranda, though, have lived in my head for a long time. I first came up
with the idea for The Herald of Day about twenty-five years ago and have
thought about them regularly since then. I know how many children they had,
what they dealt with during the long years of their existence, and even how and
when they died though the books don’t go into that. I can use them (and have
done) in other stories, of course, but their quest to lift the family curse reaches
its final disposition in The King’s Champion. At that point, they move
from the main stage to the wings.

When
I wrote the final scene about the curse, I choked up a little, to my great
surprise. Miranda and Richard are characters in books. Imaginary people. Not
friends from my neighborhood. Yet they’ve occupied space in my brain for so
long that I felt almost as though they belonged there. Finishing the trilogy
gives me a sense of accomplishment, but it’s also bittersweet in a way I think
is understandable to most writers and to many readers who loves series with
recurrent characters.

Regardless,
I love having the complete trilogy out in the world. I hope readers enjoy it.

This
has been fun! Thanks for having me, Helen.

H: My pleasure!

This series is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.

Universal Buy Links:

The Herald of Day

Universal Buy Link

The Steel Rose

Universal Buy Link

The King’s Champion

Universal Buy Link

The Boar King’s Honor Trilogy
Links:

About the author

Nancy Northcott’s childhood ambition was to grow up and
become Wonder Woman. Around fourth grade, she realized it was too late to
acquire Amazon genes, but she still loved comic books, science fiction,
fantasy, history, and romance.

Nancy earned her undergraduate degree in history and
particularly enjoyed a summer spent studying Tudor and Stuart England at the
University of Oxford. She has given presentations on the Wars of the Roses and
Richard III to university classes studying Shakespeare’s play about that
king. In addition, she has taught college courses on science fiction,
fantasy, and society.

The Boar King’s Honor historical fantasy trilogy combines
Nancy’s love of history and magic with her interest in Richard III. She also
writes traditional romantic suspense, romantic spy adventures, and two other
speculative fiction series, the Light Mage Wars paranormal romances and, with
Jeanne Adams, the Outcast Station space mystery series.

Social Media Links:

Website:

https://www.NancyNorthcott.com

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/NancyNorthcott

Facebook:

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Instagram:

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Pinterest:

https://www.pinterest.com/nancynorthcott/

Book Bub:

https://www.bookbub.com/authors/nancy-northcott