Crispin: At the Edge of the World
Edward Irving Wortis
 At the conclusion of the Newbery Award–winning Crispin: The Cross of Lead, Bear and Crispin are free to follow new lives. Though Crispin’s endurance, courage, faith, and honor have been continually tested, he has learned many lessons from his mentor, Bear. But Bear has been both wounded and weakened by his ordeals, and is tended to by an elderly wise woman, Aude, and her apprentice, Troth. Crispin learns to trust these strangers in spite of their allegiance to unfamiliar gods. When Aude is killed by a fearful, ignorant mob, Crispin rescues Troth, and the three set off for a safer land. They come upon the coastal town of Rye just one week after a brutal attack by the French and Castilians. While working in Rye, Bear continues to regain a measure of his former strength, until he is again hunted by his former friends, members of Ball’s brotherhood. Bear’s makeshift family consisting of Crispin and Troth—set sail for Flanders, only to be shipwrecked on the French coast. A “free” company of English soldiers, whose loyalty is only to their own gain, usurps the bedraggled threesome. Their leader, Richard Dudley, has his eye on treasure and inflicts the same atrocities on a French town that his countrymen are still reeling from in Rye. In order to loot the treasures of the local church, Dudley enlists the diminutive Troth to gain entrance through a drain, and Bear is held hostage. They rescue bear and set off for iceland.