Jaret is a member of the Brood Trove, the children of his father's four wives who live in cold and squalor below the luxury of his father's apartments in the Tier House at the centre of his father's lands. His society is feudal, his upbringing brutal, at the age of 3 the Brood Trove are separated from their mothers and placed in the Brood Trove, if they survive they are trained to fight and protect their father and his territory, but many don't survive. Warlike farmers and mighty warriors the Lakesiders are fearful of the Night People who live in the unfamiliar forests that boundary their lands.
Separated from Jaret by a gulf of time Nela is searching with her father for traces of the history of their civilization. She is unusual, in her society women marry and have children, but she is unlikely to find a husband as she fits which appals those around her She has shaved her head as a sign that she is not marriageable and she and her father move in a small band with his apprentice Findsmen and a bondsman, a slave tethered to the boundary of their camp.
On the shore of the same Lake Jaret lived beside they find a stone, a stone which conjures in Nela fits filled with visions of the life of Stone, a Night Person, and the narrative begins to move back and forward between Jaret and Stone's lives in the prehistory of Nela's world, and Nela's own life. As Jaret and Nela's lives come together on the death of his father and the casting out of much of the Brood Trove a terrible spell is unleashed on their world.
I felt the book needed to be a little longer, there was sometimes confusion and I felt there was not enough development in the climax of the story. However, all the characters were brilliantly deliniated and I always wanted to turn the next page and know more.
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