"Card is a formidable storyteller."
- The Miami Herald

A family of poor mages in exile in our world, existing in uneasy truce with other Families of Westil, the North clan lives in a rambling family complex, isolated in the hills of western Virginia.

Danny North knew from early childhood that his family was different and that he was different from them.  While his cousins were learning how to create the things that commoners called fairies, ghosts, golems, trolls, were-wolves, and other such miracles that were the heritage of the North family, Danny worried that he would never show a talent.  Everyone thought that he was a drowther, child of the mages born without magic.

But Danny is not a drowther.  Danny is a gatemage.  And when he figures that out, he knows that he'll have to run for his life.  There is only one thing that all the Families agree on: that no single clan can be allowed to open a gate back to their homeworld.  To prevent that, they have all agreed that any child who shows signs of being a gatemage will be killed, instantly.

"Mr. Card is giving a kind of tour of fantasy, possibilities while integrating them into his intricately imagined system of magic....  The hints of real history behind the families are especially enticing: I look forward to learning more."
- The Wall Street Journal

"With a little flavor of Roger Zelazny's Amber books, and a taste of Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain, Card has delivered a science fantasy series that manages to anchor itself both in the quotidian and the marvelous, at once darkly ancient and brightly modern."
- Locus magazine

FOR DANNY NORTH, being the most powerfu mage on Earth or Westil doesn't make high school any easier.  His impulsive miracles only make it harder to hide from the Families who want to either control him or kill him.  He knows that they will use his friends against him.

Danny is beginning to suspect he made a terrible mistake when he wove his Great Gate using the captured power of long-dead gatemages.  He hopes it won't be a fatal mistake.

"Card is a formidable storyteller with many strengths, particularly that of making the reader like and identify with his protagonists."
- The Miami Herald

Danny North is perhaps the greatest gatemage ever born.  The mage-born Families of Westil have lived in exile on Earth for more than two thousand years, but Danny's power could reopen the Great Gates and allow the Families to redouble their powers by traveling to Westil and back to Earth again.  But' it's not as easy as it might seem - the reason they are in exile is that a mysterious gatemage, called the Gate Thief, closed all the Great Gates millennia ago and still survived to stop, to kill, any gatemage who tries to reopen them.  But Danny battled the Gate Thief, and won.  Now the ways are all open, though under his control.

What Danny North didn't know at the time was that the Gate Thief had a very good reason for closing:the Great Gates.  Another power, the greatest enemy of man or mage ever created, was using the Great Gates to lay waste to both worlds - and Danny has now fallen into the power of that great enemy of both Earth and Westil.