All Calum remembers is growing up in a peaceful settlement in the Isles on the edge of the North Sea. Yet something keeps calling him, hinting of a different life, a different past, a different future.
Across the icy sea, Lena has grown up the daughter of an Isles man taken as a slave in a Northern raid. Her adopted world is dominated by strength of arms, by men and their ambitions. But with the arrival in their community of a powerful seeress, Lena soon finds herself drawn into a world of old gods, strange runes and high politics.