The White Rose

The White Rose is the third novel in Glen Cook's Black Company series. It was published in 1985.

The series follows an elite mercenary unit, the Black Company, through roughly forty years of its approximately four-hundred-year history, and it combines the machinery of epic fantasy with a dark view of what soldiers do for the powers that hire them. The past that shapes the third book is this: the Dominator and his wife, the Lady, both supremely skilled in magic, founded an empire legendary for its evil, and they were defeated by a rebellion led by the White Rose. They were too powerful to be killed, so the rebels imprisoned them and their strongest servants in the Barrowland. A wizard named Bomanz later awakened the Lady in the hope of learning from her, and she used him to escape, released her Taken, and rebuilt the empire while betraying her husband and leaving him imprisoned. The Black Company was central to putting down a rebellion against her new empire, which is where the first book leaves the story and the third picks it up.

Cook writes the series with his attention on the ordinary members of the company rather than on the great figures of the world, and the books are narrated largely by Croaker, its doctor and annalist.