He lost a kingdom at fifteen. He would burn the world to get it back.

For the young Prince Harald Sigurdsson, the bloody mud of Stiklestad was not an end, but a brutal beginning. Exiled, wounded, and hunted after the death of his brother, King Olaf, he is stripped of his home, his title, and his honor. With nothing but his royal blood and a heart filled with a cold, simmering rage, he walks the ghost's road east to the court of Kievan Rus' and then south, to the glittering, treacherous heart of the known world: Constantinople.

In the service of the Byzantine Emperor, he finds his true calling. He enlists in the elite Varangian Guard, and through years of relentless medieval warfare, he forges a new identity. On the pirate coasts of the Mediterranean, the sun-scorched plains of Asia Minor, and the blood-soaked hills of Bulgaria, he becomes a legend—the "Bulgar-Burner," the "Thunderbolt of the North," a commander whose tactical genius is matched only by his unflinching cruelty. He learns the language of power not in councils, but in sieges; not in treaties, but in terror. Amassing a king's ransom in gold, he is ready to return home.

But the Norway he returns to is not the one he left. The throne is occupied by his own nephew, the pious Magnus the Good. Through a campaign of fear and a pragmatic, cold-blooded betrayal, Harald seizes a share of the crown, his ambition finally tasting the power it has craved. When Magnus dies, leaving Harald as the sole, undisputed king, his gaze turns to the ultimate prize. In the year 1066, with the English throne suddenly vacant, he sees his destiny. Forging an unholy alliance with the exiled brother of the new English king, he assembles the greatest Viking invasion fleet of the age to claim the richest kingdom in the north. This is his final, epic gamble. This is the story of the last great Viking king, a true and brutal Viking saga of an antihero's relentless rise and his final, catastrophic fall at the fateful Battle of Stamford Bridge—the bloody day that forever marked the end of an era.