Jarl Hawkins is an ex-geographer from the planet Earth, ex-partisan from the planet Jubal, and is now marooned on the planet Vanir-a backward world with sorcerers, black-powder weapons, nomad raiders, and a church seeking to become all powerful. He has lost track of his friend, the great wizard Kvasir Haroldson. Jarl is desperate to find another wizard who can help him get off Vanir and back to his home world. Instead, he discovers a witch who is one of the feared nomads. Kiska Ericson is a Sulfur Hills People and has been banished to the mountains for practicing her craft. Jarl befriends her, and together they search the Province of Cimarron, the Sabre Mountains, the secret Ghost Raider city of Jorvik, and the magical city of Vor for some word of Kvasir. While they journey throughout the country, the King of Vanir dies and Jarl’ friend Will James is made king. Jarl and Kiska must return to the frontier province of Kettlewand to help Will James save his nation.

When Japan attacks Alaska and the U.S. government abandons the Aleuts in internment camps, 14-year-old Kiska must save her people.

Alaska s Aleutian Island chain, barren and windswept, arcs for over a thousand miles toward Asia from the Alaska Peninsula. In this remote and hostile archipelago is Kiska, an uninhabited sub-arctic speck in the tempestuous Bering Sea. Few have the opportunity even to visit this island, but in June of 1942 Japanese troops seized Kiska and neighboring Attu in the only occupation of North American territory since the War of 1812. The bastion of Japan s possessions in Alaska, Kiska was soon fortified with 7,500 enemy troops, a seaplane base, naval anchorage and submarine base, heavy guns and a labyrinth of tunnels. For thirteen months Japanese troops held a tenuous hold on the island under constant bombardment from American forces, but finally and successfully abandoning the island. So hurried was the evacuation that equipment and personal effects were left behind. The Japanese occupiers of Kiska have remained shadowy figures. Brendan Coyle spent 51 days on Kiska searching out the tunnels, equipment and personal effects frozen in time. Those objects are brought back to life in the over three hundred images Coyle has assembled from his own visit and from archives. His writing puts the images in historical and contemporary perspective, opening a new window on a remote battlefield and unforgiving landscape."