Jestyn was an Englishman and Thormod was a Dane. But the two had fought shoulder to shoulder against the enemy, so there was no question 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 brother 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
Jacket illustration by Michael Eagle
From copyright page: "The maps in this book have been redrawn by Laurence Fullbrooke from maps in Dimitri Obolensky's The Byzantine Commonwealth, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, and the source material is used by kind permission of the publishers."
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