By the author of Firedrake's Eye a masterpiece of voice, historical detail, and psychological insight to rival Peter Ackroyd and A. S. Byatt England in the mid-1580s faced an array of international foes and was torn internally by religious strife. At its center was a slight woman of exceptional intellectual brilliance. Her stature approached that of a deity -- Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. But this icon was more than a reflection of the Queen's personal charisma, it was a political creation, designed to hold a fractious people together. Unicorn's Blood is about a dangerous secret, the existence of a private diary kept by the Queen as a young princess. Should this stolen journal, embroidered with a unicorn that has a ruby for an eye, fall into the wrong hands, its intimate revelations would destroy the entire edifice of Tudor government.