The Dragon Waiting

In this fifteenth century, the Emperor Julian was not killed in Persia, Christianity remained a minor sect, and Byzantium never fell. It has instead spread west, absorbing kingdoms by gold and murder, and only England and a fractured France stand outside it. Four people meet at an inn in the Alps and find they have the same enemy: Hywel Peredur, a Welsh wizard raised in a burnt village; Dimitrios Ducas, a Byzantine officer's son whose loyalty has been repaid with his father's death; Cynthia Ricci, a Florentine physician who was Lorenzo de' Medici's doctor and could not save him; and Gregory von Bayern, a German artillery engineer and a vampire, which in this world is a medical condition with tactical implications. Their road leads to England, to the Wars of the Roses, and to Richard of Gloucester, whose reputation this novel is quietly and thoroughly interested in. Ford explains nothing, ever. Names, allegiances and plots arrive without gloss and the reader is expected to keep up, which is why the book has the reputation it does: dense, allusive, coldly moving, and unmatched in the genre for what it does with alternate history.