Dear Reader,

The book is finished now and has gone out to my advance readers.

I always find this part a little frightening.

I have lived with this story for months. It was never meant to be more than a single book, and now it has become something much larger. Letting it go, even in stages, is not as easy as I pretend it is.

The Kingmaker’s Spy launches in three weeks.

And before that happens, there is something I want to tell you: I keep coming back to a detail most people forget. Not the battle of Towton itself, not the scale of it or what it decided, but what came just before.

The night before the battle, Warwick was already bleeding.

On 28 March 1461, at Ferrybridge in Yorkshire, a Lancastrian force struck the Yorkist vanguard as they were crossing the River Aire. It was sudden and badly timed. The crossing broke into confusion, men pushed back toward the water, some cut down where they stood, others driven into the river.

Warwick was there. He was wounded in the leg by an arrow in the fighting.

Edward IV was not with the vanguard when the attack began, but he came up with the main force soon after and forced the crossing back under Yorkist control. It had not been clean, and it had not been easy.

The next day, on Palm Sunday, 29 March 1461, the armies met again at Towton. It was fought in a snowstorm, with the wind driving into the Lancastrian line. By the end of the day, thousands were dead. It remains the bloodiest battle fought on English soil.

Warwick fought at Towton. He did so with that wound still in his leg, in the cold, in the chaos, when he could very reasonably have stayed back.

That is the part that has stayed with me.

Not the numbers, and not even the outcome, but the decision. The fact that he was already hurt and went anyway. That he chose to stand in it.

He is remembered for what he made and unmade in kings. That is how history tends to speak of him.

But there is something else there, in moments like this, that does not always make it onto the page.

If you want to step into that world before anyone else, you can pre-order The Kingmaker’s Spy now.

I have set the pre-order price at £/$3.99 for early readers.

YOUR EXCLUSIVE: A LETTER NEVER SENT

Below is something I have never shared publicly.

It is a private letter from Alice Neville, written in 1457. It does not appear in the novel. It exists only here.

A LETTER NEVER SENT · CALAIS 1457

The Kingmaker’s Spy launches on 14 April 2026.

If you pre-order, I will send you a second letter from Alice, and one from Warwick both written in Calais in 1457, at the point where everything has already begun to turn.

Those ones I am keeping back for early readers.

Email your order confirmation to info@goslingpenandpage.com and I will send it to you.

Note that the pre-order price will remain at $/£3.99 until launch.

I am also looking for a small group of readers to read the book before launch and leave an honest review on Amazon. If that sounds like you, simply reply to this email. I would love to have you.

With love,
Augusta x

P.S. Find me on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok too. Links below. Come say hello.

Follow me on Instagram​

Find me on Facebook​

Follow me on TikTok​

Read the Lochlainn Series for free on KU https://amzn.to/4oGkhc6​

​https://www.goslingpenandpage.com/more-info​