The Purple Plague

By Susan Page Davis

Alaric, the castle cook’s helper, is too short to be a knight, but he’s had the Purple Plague before, so he’s the only one who doesn’t get sick when the king’s evil brother brings the disease to the castle. It’s up to Alaric to save the king–and keep the purple fungus on the royal feet from spreading. While the enemy overruns the castle, can he put the secret weapon in place before it’s too late? A fairy tale for children of all ages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan Page Davis
• Release date: Feb 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781947079120

Susan Page Davis

A Maine native, Susan Page Davis is an award-winning author with more than seventy novels and novellas. She's a winner of the 2012 and 2016 Will Rogers Medallion Awards and a past winner of the Carol Award and two Inspirational Readers' Choice Awards. Enjoy her mysteries, romantic suspense, and historical romance with a faith thread in most of her stories. Susan now lives in Kentucky.

Book preview

The Purple Plague

Susan Page Davis

Copyright ©2019 by Susan Page Davis

Printed in the U.S.A.

Published by Tea Tin Press, P. O. Box 1262, Murray, KY 42071

Cover by Tyler Kennebec

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to actual people, organization, and/or events is purely coincidental.

The Purple Plague

If only I could reach it, Alaric thought. He stretched on tiptoe, grasping for the key to the dungeon door, but he was still just too short.

Sir Rollo, the king’s evil brother, had hung the key on a peg almost as high as the door lintel.

Rollo was not only evil and tall, he was crafty. He had bided his time, waiting years for the right moment to overthrow his brother, King Eldred.

That moment had come three weeks ago. The town was beset by a noxious purple plague, and many people were ill. The disease wasn’t fatal, but whoever caught it was laid up for at least three weeks.

Rollo got it early, and he was over it now. In fact, he was the first person in the castle to catch the plague, and he had brought it in to make the others sick. He sneezed all over the Great Hall, not even bothering to cover his nose when he did so. Then he took to his bed in the West Tower.

Just as Rollo was recovering, King Eldred and all of his loyal knights came down with the sickness. All except Alaric, that is. Alaric, a helper to the royal cook, was born in Jillitar, the land over the mountain. Jillitar had a bad bout of plague twenty years earlier, when Alaric was a lad. That’s the only good thing about the purple plague—you can only catch it once.

Alaric caught it when