Resisting the dark Gift that her mother insists is her responsibility, a young woman reluctantly begins her training in the practitioner arts when a band of werewolves begin to prey on the children of her village. Original.

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.

Now that Alfreda has begun to learn the Wise Arts, she is needed at home in the village of Sun Return. The woods around the cabin are alive with poltergeists. Candles light by themselves, and even the rocks dance. There is much work for an apprentice practitioner.But a more dangerous task calls. For a new family has moved to the frontier; a family with strange ambitions and even stranger powers. And chief among them is an enigmatic man known on the Other Side as The Keeper of Souls....

“The world is woven of secrets.” Ritual magic mixes dangerously with wild magic. Yet Alfreda Sorensson’s talent has grown until she becomes a target for worldly and unworldly powers. Now, to save her soul, she must leave her pioneer home in the Michigan Territory to take refuge at an elite New York school, where her wild magic places her in direct conflict with the ritual taught to young Americans and Europeans. Alfreda suspects that half the professors may not be human at Windward Academy. It’s a curious place, a last chance for students who can’t control their powers, and a place where everything is a test, in one way or another. At first Alfreda thinks her greatest challenge will be mastering ritual. Then she learns that traitors have infiltrated the school–and the new nation. War looms between the United States and England, and Alfreda answers the call. Only after she spies her way into an enemy magician’s estate does she learn the true challenge of her own power– Because when dark magic finds her, she’s utterly on her own.