Search Worlds Without End

Tales of power and magic often speak of transitions. Magicians pass from day into night, from dark into dawn--they stand on the threshold of change and cast their spells. The stories we usually tell about our heroes are the flashy ones, the calling of the lightning tales, the riding of the storm saga, the splitting the earth and swallowing the enemy whole adventures.

Wings of Morning tells about two heroines, both capable in their own ways of pyrotechnics, but this time learning lessons of subtle power. Anthropologist Brenna Stewart discovers that you can neither run from nor dictate to magic, while young Alfreda Sorensson of Night Calls and Kindred Rites learns that the power of life and death may be the greatest authority of all...and that magic may have nothing to do with it.

Table of Contents:

• If I Take the Wings of Morning - (1998) - novelette
• Ducks - (2005) - shortstory

"When you have the Gift, your life is not your own."

I was born to a family that harnessed the winds and could read futures in fire and water. Yet my mother kept her secrets.

Then the werewolf came, sharing his madness.

Now it's my turn to keep secrets....

Descended from powerful magic-users, but ignorant of her heritage, young Alfreda Sorensson learns magic and wisdom from her extended family in an alternate early 1800s Michigan Territory.

The werewolves came shattering the peace of the village of Sun Return. Five were taken before the girl's parents agreed to give her up. They called in Cousin Cory, Aunt Marta, all the known practitioners. The ones who could teach me how to hide in a leaf, dip into minds, and find the secret herbs that heal. Her childhood now over, the girl must face the Dark of the Other Side.

"...we are all Death's pupils, we practitioners--students of the great healer."

When magic broke free in my blood, I chose to follow our ancient family path and become a practitioner. I'm learning to heal, and to protect innocents. I dip into minds, stalk vampires, and set wards by the light of the moon. I can hear the children of the night calling.

But there are other families...and other paths. Families with twisted ambitions and frightening powers. On the frontier, folk whisper that one clan is the most dangerous of all.

Chief among those dark sorcerers is a man known as the Keeper of Souls.

And now he wants to keep mine.

Alfreda Sorensson has survived her first major test as a woman of power and returns to visit her family. No longer a child, she must now deal with a poltergeist infesting her family house and run for freedom when a handsome young man kidnaps her for his clan leader. Kindred Rites is a tale of powerful magic and compelling humanity, with a young heroine and an unusual historical setting.

The world is woven of secrets.

I was born with lightning in one hand and mercy in the other, but what I need is the pattern to my tapestry of power.

Danger drove me from the primeval American wilderness to Windward Academy, where the Wizard of Manhattan offers me one last chance to learn magical control. Windward--where every word, every breath is a test. Every lesson can be deadly. And every challenge can explode out of the schoolroom and into the realms of demons.

Sometimes a shadow is so dark it arrives before the sun.

For more than 150 years, she has traveled the Seven Systems, slipping in and out of Cold Sleep. She is a free-trader, the aristocracy of con artists, able to fleece the dishonest with their own greed.

The woman is known as Silver, when she is named at all --- and she may be the finest free-trader living. But even she is not prepared for the reality of Nuala, planet of deadly radiation levels, humans who heal by touch, and the rarest platinum group metal in the known galaxy. Eighty percent of the citizens are sterile, and the wealthy send their children out to seek mates and find others willing to expand the planetary gene pool. A Nualan can smell a lie at fifty paces. Truth, honor -- and their children -- are everything to the people of Nuala.

On Nuala, for the first time, Silver will be forced to use her real name -- Darame Daviddottir -- and she will walk the thinnest line between truth and lie of her long and varied career.

The scam she's come to join has just been blown to the skies, along with the throne lines of three separate sovereign nations. Now Darame has just one decision -- which group of Nualans will she support in the days to come? Mere chance threw her into the camp of the Atares, leaders of the largest clan on Nuala. Will she help them? Thwart them? Wait for the dust to settle?

The tipping point may have already occurred. Turns out she's mentioned in Nualan religious prophecy, and has caught the eye of the last adult male of a throne line. Sheel Atare is a "hot" healer, able to close ripped flesh and draw fever with a touch. A reclusive professor and medical doctor, unprepared to rule, Sheel Atare needs all the allies he can get.

Even allies who may be connected to those who brought down his house.

Garth Kristinsson's parents were free-traders, the aristocracy of con artists, able to fleece the dishonest with their own greed. But his father's last scam went horribly wrong, and at the last, both his parents were dead. Garth wanted answers no authority could give him, so he searched for decades for any clue, any lead on his father's partners-in-crime. One of them still lived -- he would find her on the mysterious planet Nuala.

Nuala... planet of deadly radiation levels, humans who heal by touch, and the rarest platinum group metal in the known galaxy.

"Silver" is Darame Daviddottir, a famous free-trader who is now a citizen of Nuala -- her husband, Sheel Atare, leads one of the planet's most powerful tribes. Together they have brought an uneasy peace to a world racked by sterility, intrigue, and unimaginable wealth. For the first time in countless generations, Nualans are actually working together, their council a voice for interstellar trade and a sounding board for inter-tribal cooperation. But the new ruler of Atare's ancient enemy is a spoiled and arrogant genius named Rex Dielaan. When off-worlder Garth meets aristocrat Rex, it is a meeting of two con artists ripe for mischief... and maybe murder. Two misplaced quests explode into a conspiracy of death, treason, and abduction. There's a plan afoot leading toward war, and it threatens Nuala's peace, Atare's prosperity... and Silver's life.

Rising like a phoenix from the embers of an abandoned scientific expedition, the people of Nuala are the definition of survivors. They have fought back against the deadly radiation levels of their beautiful, dangerous world. Nualans have battled frightening mutations, genetic shift, and the highest rate of infertility in the Axis Republic. Their reward is a society based on tolerance, compassion, and cultural diversity, descendants who can sense a lie (and a few who can heal by touch) -- and a bonanza of the rarest platinum group metal in the known galaxy.

Balanced on the border between the Axis Republic and the Fewha Empire, ruled by a constitutional monarchy, the small Nualan system counters its low birth rate by sending out its children to search for mates to expand the planetary gene pool. Some Axis citizens choose Nuala. One, a decorated soldier named Moran, is about to marry a Nualan princess.

But heirs to power and wealth have enemies, both homegrown and interstellar. There are those who would kill to keep an Axis warrior from marrying a Nualan... and those who think it's the perfect smoke screen to keep anyone from noticing where the border is about to shift.

Nuala means survival. Survival against all odds, all enemies, all fortune. They're going to have to prove it.