On impulse, Jenna Rosen leaves the party she and her real estate developer husband, Robert, are attending in Seattle, takes his BMW and drives north to Bellingham. Again on impulse, she hops on the ferry to the Alaskan town where her Tlingit Indian grandmother lived and died. But there's more than impulse at work here: Jenna and Robert's 5-year-old son, Bobby, drowned in Alaska just two years ago, and something is drawing Jenna back to the scene. On the ferry, she's given a carved silver charm of a Tlingit spirit called a kushtaka, a stealer of souls.
Fourteen-year-old Matt Freeman is an orphan in a lot of trouble. After he's caught stealing he is funneled into the LEAF system, a new program that England has put in place to deal with youthful offenders. Through LEAF, Matt is "fostered" with the evil Mrs. Deverill, a satanic witch bent on torturing Matt. Everyone Matt gets close to has a bad habit of ending up dead and no one can seem to tell him about something called Raven's Gate - a mysterious place that is somehow tied to Matt's own psychic abilities.
Gunnlaug answers, "Neither Onund nor Thorfin are men as good as my father. Nay, thou thyself clearly fallest short of him--or what hast thou to set against his strife with Thorgrim the Priest, the son of Kiallak, and his sons, at Thorsness Thing, where he carried all that was in debate?"
Every time Crawford caught sight of his ordinary raven's feathers, he wished he looked differently. From the minute he pops out of the egg, Crawford wants to be special. The raven finally gets his wish when an old woman transforms him into a spectacular creature with dazzling feathers. He has a brief spell of glory as the chained fancy of a princess, but all too soon is relegated to a golden cage in an obscure part of the garden. He then pines only for freedom, which he achieves by plucking out his shiny feathers so that the princess, horrified by his ugliness, banishes him. He returns to his friends a wiser bird.
In this second volume of the trilogy begun with The Rowan , McCaffrey introduces Damia Raven, brilliant and willful daughter of Angharad Gwyn (the Rowan) and Jeff Raven, leaders of the psionic Talents of Federal Telepath & Teleport, who make interstellar commerce possible. The precocious Damia's difficult childhood is made tolerable by the care and solicitude of Afra Lyon, her parents' valued friend and assistant, who secretly loves the child as much as he did her mother.
