This is Book 2 of my trilogy set in Yugoslavia during World war ll.

Alix has escaped from occupied France and managed to find her way home, but she has not been able to let anyone know she is coming. She arrives at the country home on the night Hitler unleashes a devastating bombing raid on Belgrade and is horrified to learn that her parents are at the family’s house in the city. She turns to her childhood friend Dragomir, whom she regards like an elder brother, and asks him to accompany her to search for them.

Leo has been helping the wounded but Sasha’s main concern is the safety  of the young King Peter, for whom he has been a surrogate father. When it is decided that the king and his ministers should move to Pale in the mountains outside Sarajevo he feels it is his duty to go with them. Leo follows. Alix and Dragomir spend several days searching the city before they discover this and they then set out in pursuit, but the Yugoslav army has collapsed and German tanks are rolling across the country, cutting them off from the road to Sarajevo. They return to Belgrade and Alix does what she feels her mother would do. She opens the house as a makeshift hospital and refuge for the wounded and dispossessed.

Croatia opens it’s gates to Hitler’s troops and as defeat seems inevitable it is decided that the King and his court must go into exile to avoid falling into German hands. Sasha and Leo go with him, initially to Athens and then by a roundabout route to London.

One day Alix comes face to face with Nikola, the man she was supposed to marry. He, like her, studied at the Sorbonne, though several years earlier, and, like her, came under the influence of the communists. He asks her if she is prepared to join the resistance and when she assents he introduces her to a man known as Tito. He is a charismatic leader and she and Dragomir join his small band of resisters. They are able to show him where her mother concealed caches of arms provided by SOE before the war started, (see Book 1) and he comes to regard her as his lucky mascot.

After the city is occupied Tito decides to move to Uzice, where he declares a short-lived republic.

Unknown to Alix, Steve, the young American she fell in love with in Paris, has been recruited by Colin Gubbins, the head of SOE, and sent to Yugoslavia as a liaison officer with the army. When they are ordered to surrender one man, General Draza Mihailovic, refuses and takes to the hills to set up a band of guerrilla fighters who call themselves Chetniks. Steve goes with him.

For a short while the two resistance organisations try to cooperate, but their aims are too different. The Chetniks are Royalists, who want to see the old order restored and to create a Greater Serbia by expelling all Croats and Muslims. Tito, with his Partisans, wants to see a communist state where all the different communities have an equal part and there is a better life for the peasants who make up much of the population. The two groups are soon at each other’s throats.

Nikola has become very jealous and wants Alix to agree to marry him. When Steve accompanies a delegation of Chetniks to a meeting she catches a brief glimpse of him but Nikola intervenes and prevents them from meeting.

With the German army getting ever closer Tito and his Partisans are forced to abandon Uzice and Alix finds herself caught up in a year of bitter guerrilla warfare in the  mountains of Bosnia and Hercegovina. On several occasions only the devoted support of Dragomir keeps her alive. She comes to realise that his feelings for her are not those of a brother but she cannot reciprocate. She insists on playing an active role in the fighting and by the end of the summer she can regard herself as a true partizanska. Eventually the Partisans reach Bihac, in the north of the country, where they are again able to set up a republic. But it is not achieved without a final fight in which Alix plays a part that results in her being publicly named as a heroine by Tito. As winter sets in, she is rewarded at last by a message from Steve, letting her know that he has not forgotten her and hopes they will be together again one day.