Lockeran

When you play the Blood-Red Game you will lose! 


Twenty years after Innisgarbh, Prince Ciaran the Damned has been earning his nickname, as a mercenary, bodyguard, general and assassin; whatever pays best for a man with the Sight. He can see danger before it arrives – almost before it is thought of. He can plan ways to avoid it, or to make it work in your favour.


Kings, warlords and usurpers covet his Gift and they hate him for it.


When the boy-king Clovis repays service with assassination, Ciaran beats off his attackers, steals the king's treasure and heads to Spain for a well-earned rest.


Fate has other ideas. Supernatural influences force him northwards, across the hostile Frankish kingdoms, where word is spreading that a dangerous assassin is on the loose.


Ciaran's destiny is in Britain, across the Narrow Sea, where he faces a climactic confrontation with an old enemy.


He survives imprisonment, ambush and shipwreck, and arrives at Ynys Witrin – Avalon – just in time for its destruction. His destination is the River Winwaed, in the kingdom of Mercia. King Penda is determined to bring to heel King Oswy of Northumbria, a thorn in his flesh for twenty years. Ciaran’s Sight is Penda’s trump card; the means to foresee surprise attacks, to uncover surprise reinforcements and to deliver the perfect battle-plan.


But other forces are at work. Ciaran doesn’t know that he is carrying an Apple of Discord right into heart of the Mercian camp, where it threatens to deliver crushing defeat to Penda’s alliance, rather than ultimate victory. And a warning from the Otherworld delivers a deadly threat, to Ciaran himself: “When you play the Blood-Red Game, you will lose!” If he should lose a confrontation against an enemy he believed he had destroyed years before, he faces total obliteration – or something even worse: to be trapped in his own torments, a Lockeran, lost to this world and adrift in the Other:


Prince. Druid. Murderer. Madman


Prince Ciaran the Damned. A new hero for a Dark Age.