As Christendom approached the First Millennium, conflict and war prevailed throughout a troubled Scotland. Internal feuding was rife, the population remained under constant threat from bloodthirsty Viking raids, and the High Kings of Scots came and went, their brief reigns usually coming to an abrupt and violent end.
In 995, Kenneth the Second was the monarch. By necessity he was forced to govern with a heavy hand. But the severity of his rule was to arouse the enmity of a strange, unforgiving woman - and the consequences of her antagonism would spell disaster for Kenneth and his kingdom.
Young, Cormac mac Farquhar, newly succeeding his father as Thane of Glamis, was to find himself reluctantly caught up in the ensuing national chaos. But out of this legacy of hatred, little did Cormac know that he would find unexpected happiness.
Nigel Tranter's extraordinary narrative genius is at its imaginative best in this vivid tale of the so-called Dark Ages, one of the most little-known - and violent - periods in the whole of Scotland's dramatic history