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Roadsouls explores the power of art and creativity for transforming not only one's own life but also the world one lives in. Timid Duuni has spent her life as abused and guarded property. Blind, arrogant Raím is determined to be again what he once was: hunter, lover, young lord of the earth. Desperate to escape their lives, the two lift up their hands to the passing Roadsoul caravan, and are flung together naked. Each of them soon learns that saying yes to the Roadsouls is more than just accepting an invitation to a new life--it's a commitment that can't be reversed. For Duuni and Raím, nothing is as it was.

Lost to their old lives, hating each other, they are swept out of their cruel old certainties into an unknown, unknowable, ever-changing world of journey and carnival, artists and wrestlers and thieves. Behind them, inexorable, pads a lion. Inexorable, too, is Duuni and Raím s inevitable encounter with it, an encounter that will change everything.

Sixteen-year-old Kat, child of a scandalous, disastrous marriage between a Hill woman and an Upslope man, rescues a Rigi man from the sea during the week of the Long Night Dance and begins to realize a person's value does not come from his background nor appearance.

What if initiation into womanhood means you must face a snarling bear? What if you fail?

Sixteen-year-old Kat has fled the tyrannical rule of her father and now lives among her mother's people: a society that is joyful and caring, but conformist and bound by superstition. She has spent a year dutifully preparing for her initiation rite. She is frightened and uncertain, yet only by completing the ritual can she be accepted into the circle of women.

And what will she do about Raím, the young blind man she is drawn to: so handsome and artistic... and so angry? And what of Nall, the man she left behind?

In her father's village Kat is scorned for her fiery red hair, the legacy of her father's shameful marriage to a native woman. Her only true home is with Nall, a man who appeared to her from the depths of the sea, an outsider too.

Now a war is breaking out, and Kat's beloved brother, Dai, is taken prisoner. Kat realizes that the only way she can save him is to join Nall on a dangerous quest that will take them to the last boundary of all -- the Gate where the world was born. It is during this journey that Kat must confront not only the earthly battle that is tearing her world apart, but the struggle within herself and with the man she loves.