In the newly united Scotland of the 850s, elite poets -- like druids in the past -- are power brokers. Aidan, poet to the High King, Kenneth MacAlpin, treads a precarious path between contentious chiefs, and old and new religions, as he guides his foster-sister through the equally precarious terrain of Second Sight. Historically based, full of lyric imagination, The Stringless Harp looks to one of Europe's oldest cultures in a tale of timeless integrity.