From the World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Bards of Bone Plain .Something half-woke in him, and he froze on the threshold, seeing misshapen faces billow in the flames.As a child, Rook had been taken in by the bards of Luly, and raised as one of their own. Of his past he knew nothing'except faint memoires of fire and death that he'd do anything to forget.But nightmares, and a new threat to the island that had become his own, would not let him escape the dreadful fate of his true family. Haunted by the music of the bards, he left the only home he knew to wander the land of the power-hungry Basilisk who had destroyed his family. And perhaps, finally, to find a future in the fulfillment of his forgotten destiny...ReviewPraise for Patricia A. McKillip and her novels"There are no better writers than Patricia A. McKillip."—Stephen R. Donaldson“I’ve been reading Pat’s books from the beginning...I’ve always loved her work for the obvious things, the things that everybody else who writes about her loves her books for, too: her sense of style, her deep understanding of the ancient story-myths that all of us story-tellers build on, the humanity, which is also to say the unpredictability, of her (human!) characters, who are and are not what they appear to be, and who often surprise us for both good and ill—just the way people out here in the real world do.”—Robin McKinley“Weaving the past and present together into a vividly human and deftly layered story, master storyteller McKillip once again shows that language can be magic.”— New York Journal of Books