In the year 986, nearly a thousand years after ‘The Fall’, in the Ryaduran Princedom of Eastern, the forces of good overcame the forces of evil at the Second Siege Of The Northernmost Tower, but not all of the warriors returned home: Clissa’s father did not.Clissa, the adolescent daughter of a Guild Warrior, had been confident of her place in society and idly dreamed of heroic adventure. But she also lives in dread that her darkest secret might be discovered - that she has been gifted with ‘the power of the gods’; infrequent and dangerously unpredictable flashes of a power to ‘Change The Elements’ which she can neither summon nor control, and which she is fervently praying will naturally fade away. Even worse, the powers of the gods are the province of men... and men alone. Women who show these powers are condemned as witches.Her whole world collapses after her father is killed in battle and she is sent to live with her cruel and miserly uncle, the innkeeper in the isolated moorland village of Keldale, who uses her as an unpaid servant, and eventually provokes her into accidentally revealing her power in public. She is tried for witchcraft, convicted and imprisoned.Her uncle ‘rescues’ her, then drugs her and sells her as a slave.In the slave hall she finally succeeds in getting her power to do something vaguely like what she wants and manages to escape; but is hunted as a ‘run slave’, captured, and is only saved from the most dreadful of fates by the last minute intervention of Kevran, a young Ryaduran priest.For Clissa, growing up is condensed into ten traumatic days as Kevran seeks to right the wrongs done to her, while, under his careful tuition, she begins to learn that the world - and the role of the Ryaduran priesthood within it - are both far more complex than she had ever imagined.Her dreams of vengeance upon her uncle seem to have come true when she finds herself facing him with the sword of a ‘hero’ grasped uncertainly in her hands – and also (unwittingly) her own fate; but has Kevran’s tuition been enough to save her from her own upbringing?