She was the first saint of Rus'. But before she was a saint, she was a wife, a widow, and an avenger.
In the middle of the tenth century, a young woman from the northern forests named Olga is married to Igor, the Prince of Kyiv. It is not a fairy-tale romance, but a union of two lonely souls: Igor, a prince haunted by the ghost of a father he never knew and the fear of being seen as weak, and Olga, a girl raised by a shaman grandmother who taught her to remember everything.
When Igor is brutally murdered by the Drevlian tribe—torn in two by bent birch trees as punishment for demanding excessive tribute—the world Olga knows collapses. Left with her young son, Sviatoslav, and a kingdom on the brink of chaos, she faces an impossible choice. The boyars see only a woman; the Drevlians see only a prize, sending envoys to force her into marriage with their own prince, Mal.
But they have made a fatal mistake. They have underestimated the memory of a woman who never forgets.
What follows is a campaign of calculated, terrifying revenge. Olga buries the first party of Drevlian envoys alive in a pit. She burns the second party to death in a bathhouse. She slaughters the third party at a funeral feast for her husband. And finally, she lays siege to the Drevlian capital of Iskorosten, using an ingenious and horrifying tactic—burning the entire city to the ground with the help of birds carrying lit tinder to their own nests.
