Fan Fiction: Stories 41–50

The queen mother's most useful weapon keeps a private accounting of every man she's been ordered to seduce, and what it's cost her.

A minor Huguenot gentleman's manservant survives the massacre his master doesn't, and has to decide what he owes a dead man's memory.

The woman who nursed both Charles IX and his siblings watches the Valois children grow into a tragedy she can see coming and cannot stop.

Diane's companion sees the danger circling her mistress long before Diane does, and has to decide how loudly to say so.

Bussy's loyal physician-friend has treated half the court's secrets along with their ailments, and some of them are starting to overlap dangerously.

One of the king's favorites makes a bet he immediately regrets, and discovers that regretting it and escaping it are two very different things.

Not every young Gascon answered the king's call to Paris. This is the story of one who almost did, and the life he chose instead.

The poorest of the Forty-Five fights his first real duel over something considerably more important than honor: dinner.

Before he became the king's most trusted jester and secret agent, Chicot spent a year doing nothing that mattered to anyone, on purpose.

Years after his death, Diane de Méridor takes stock of what a man like Bussy d'Amboise actually leaves a woman who loved him.