"'I want a thrall," said the man Thormod. Our eyes met and held.'

In exchange for six gold pieces and a wolfskin cloak, Jestyn is sold in the Dublin slave-market and becomes shield-thrall to Thormod Sitricson of the Dublin Garrison. Master and slave . . . yet between the two grows a bond of friendship so strong that when the Vikings set sail for their own lands, Jestyn accompanies Thormod as his blood brother. But Thormod's homecoming in not a happy one: he finds his father dead—slain by the brothers Anders and Herulf, who have now fled the country. Thormud and Jestyn set out in search of them, following the Viking trade-routes to Kiev and, beyond, to Byzantium: 'Two brothers against two brothers who will not turn back before all be finished, and the Death songs sung for those who are to die.' Jestyn is drawn unwillingly into the Blood Feud, taking up a cause which is not his own and from which, on his part, the spirit of revenge is missing. But the day comes when for Jestyn too the Blood Feud is something personal and obsessive.

The action of Rosemary Sutcliff's new novel, set in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, takes the reader not only to the more familiar Viking territories but to their less well-known Eastern settlements, and from there southwards to Constantinople. It provides a complex and moving exploration of the conflict between men's instincts and their codes of honour.

From the dust jacket of the Oxford University Press UK Edition

Jestyn was an Englishman and Thormod was a Dane. But the two had fought shoulder to shoulder against the enemy, so there was no questions that Jestyn, who had no home, should follow Thormod to his, in a valley of Juteland.

Horrible news awaits them there. Thormod's father is dead. Murdered. Killed by two people Thormod never dreamed would do them harm—Anders and Herulf Herulfson.

Thormod swears the Blood Feud, a contest to the death between the Herulfson brothers and himself—and now Jestyn, who says to his friend, "Your road is mine also. Two against two is a fair fight."

Rosemary Sutcliff's absorbing adventure roams over paths not often explored in stories about the Viking kind, down Russian rivers to the Baltic Sea and east to Constantinople—all more than twelve hundred years ago. A journey as much of the spirit as of the flesh, it probes the distinction between fate and will, as Jestyn, who tells the tale, grows to manhood, shaping, against odds, his own true destiny. 

From the dust jacket of the E.P. Dutton American Edition