Master storyteller Nigel Tranter tells the tale of the legendary warrior, and future King of Scots. Tutored and encouraged by William Wallace, Robert the Bruce determined to continue the fight for an independent Scotland, sustained by a passionate love for his land. This edition collects together Steps to the Empty Throne, Price of the King's Peaceand Path of the Hero King , from the master of Scottish historical fiction. Praise for Nigel Tranter:'One of Scotland's most prolific and respected writers' Times'Through his imaginative dialogue, he provides a voice for Scotland's heroes' Scotland on Sunday

    

    When a bare-knuckle fight offers both money and a purpose, he finds it turns into a monumental struggle to keep his heritage and integrity intact.

    

    Rush was born in St. Monans, one of the many fishing communities condemned by factory farming methods. He writes of the crews that sailed the Firth; the net-mending and hull-caulking; the manufacture of creels; the whelk-gathering when the fishing failed; the lobsters of August, the herring of winter; practices that Rush clearly thinks preferable to those of the present, when fishing is only 'an industry, a service, a wage packet that used to be a way of life'.Such halcyon evocations have a long lineage in Scottish writing; there has always been something: fallen leaders, should-have-won battles to bewail and mourn (Rush's most apparent predecessors are Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown, both of whom wrote Edenic accounts of their Orkney childhoods). Rush's lyricism and reliance on a degree of alliteration more associated with an oral tradition suggests a similar desire to mythicise. But the prose never stoops to sentiment: the moon is 'a drowned skull'; the classroom 'a varnished coffin'.The book is also a lament for a time of life: 'that first conscious corner of belonging cut for me out of time'; a youth spent in the fields and on the shore; deciphering the kirkyard graves; listening to eerie tales of things glimpsed at sea. Rush offers a series of portraits of those loved and gone, an attempt to extricate the 'bright splinters of people still sticking in our hearts'. And if the reader sometimes wonders if it was ever really thus and how much its lyric tone can be trusted, then, as Rush says, 'what mattered was the telling'.

    This text puts the Scottish crusader back on record, taking the tradition of Scots going abroad to fight back to the 11th century.

    There are the tranquil lowlands, where the rumble of farm machinery echoes across the soft landscape of fields and woodlands. Out to the west, like sentinels in the rolling ocean, rise the windswept, heathered islands which have become the subject of so many haunting airs and poems. Gaunt castles rise above the dark, still waters of the lochs which cast their all-pervading magic over the country. But it is still the romantic highlands which draw the imagination and tug at the heartstrings of Scots everywhere.

    

    Disguised as a man, she fought as fiercely as any Scots warrior. Then an English soldier with blazing blue eyes stormed her castle walls and exposed Jamelyn's shocking secret. The last defender of Raven's Keep was not a man but a shapely auburn-haired beauty!Even after the treacherous king made her marry Justin, her conqueror, she vowed never to surrender. Yet a smoldering passion lay between them, ready to burst into a roaring inferno... The novel of a passionate woman who could fight anything - except love.