To defeat monsters, one man must become something even more terrible, giving rise to a legend and a dreadful curse. The Order of the Dragon – Book One unfolds in 15th-century Europe, terrorized by brutal wars, cursed by superstition, and divided by religion during the lifetime of Prince Vlad of Wallachia. He struggles to master his destiny and govern the fate of his homeland against forces that would see Christian Europe consumed by darkness. As a younger son raised within royal courts, Vlad lingers in the shadow of others—his elder brother, his father's legacy, and greater princes who view Wallachia as merely another pawn. Until, alongside the capricious Luxembourg king of Hungary, Zsigmond, Vlad gains a knighthood and a new sobriquet: Dracul, meaning the dragon or the devil. His family, friends, lovers, and enemies know him as both. In a journey from the land of his birth to the decadent and dangerous royal court at Buda Castle, across Europe's oldest medieval cities and fields of carnage where Ottoman forces press westward with scimitar and flame, Vlad must survive the path to power. A bloody road mired in warfare and savagery, littered with more than the corpses of his Turkish enemies. Strange creatures haunt his imagination and his battlefield encounters, phantoms born of war's madness or something far more sinister that stalks the borderlands between the living and the dead. Deceit and betrayal dictate the course of old friendships and holy alliances. From throne rooms to battlefields where Crusaders and Ottomans clash, this is the story of a man who dared to challenge fate itself. Discover the sacrifices and bold choices Vlad must make in Order of the Dragon – Book One, the first in a series of novels about the real Dracula family, the House of Basarab.
