The Coast

January 918. The Reluctant King is thirty-four. Two years of reign have settled him. A Danish fleet that the realm has not seen assembled since the days of Charlemagne is gathering at the Limfjord under the son of a chieftain buried at Duisburg six summers earlier. The realm has one coastal hull under construction at Mainz, a mouth-chain being fabricated at Metz, a Frisian rowing cohort that has never sailed north of the Rhine's mouth, and an Admiral on a stick.

Across the three calendar years that close the opening decade of Hugh's reign, a river-kingdom becomes a sea-kingdom. The Swanehild, the realm's first true coastal hull, is laid down in the first week of March and sails on her first action in the summer of 920 at the Texel shoals. A signalling-lantern chain is laid from Rotterdam to Dokkum. A Frisian master teaches a Frankish crew to row in a tide. And a boy of ten at the opening is ten-and-confirmed at the close, standing beside his father at the Easter court of 920 — the crown prince, in the plain Carolingian form, at Aachen.

The Coast is the ninth volume of Rise of the Franks — the penultimate book of a ten-book cycle. It is the book about a Carolingian realm reaching, for the first time since Charlemagne, for a frontier that is not on a road, and about the years in which a king who was not supposed to be king became one without ceasing to be himself.