The Smoke on the Eastern Road

East Francia, A.D. 900. A sixteen-year-old bastard son of the king rides east with a borrowed command and four thousand men, to close the Moselle against a Magyar raid that has already burned three abbeys and taken forty children from a single village on the Saar.

At Remich, in a gorge the Count of Metz has chosen and cannot leave, the last sentences of the old margrave's life become the first order of Hugh's: close it. What follows — the ambush that holds, the prisoner who will not be killed, the ledger of dead read to the king by a lamp in a chancery at Aachen — becomes, by the end of the year, the shape of something no one yet knows to name: the rising of a Frankish house that the empire will one day have to be measured against.

The Smoke on the Eastern Road is the first volume of Rise of the Franks, a historical-military chronicle of East Francia at the opening of the tenth century, and of the bastard son who learns, in a single campaigning season, what it costs to give an order and be obeyed.