Kirjahaku

Before setting out for the Comanche grasslands with a herd of horses to trade, Tukor receives the medallion from his grandmother. Double crossed by the Comanche chief Crooked Horn, Tukor escapes death only by the intervention of the ancient piece of silver. Returning home with a strange slave he rescued, Tukor sets out to find the Great Water in the northwest that his great grandmother Lita sought more than 100 years before.

On the morning of the summer Solstice, Juan and Sophia Valdez in Center, CO gaze through the hole in the medallion from the Inca Empire at the rising sun. A scene from the past materializes: Indians in snow at the edge of a great forest, staring intently into the trees. Just as the scene disappears they glimpse movement of a great shape back in the trees. They hurry to Great Grandfather for an explanation and he begins the story of their ancestor Lita, who came into possession of the medallion around 1680. Fascinated by stories from seasonal traders about a great water far to the northwest, Lita and her brother Rutu leave the family's secret canyon near Santa Fe on a year's trip to find the water. Attacked by a war party, the medallion saves them from death and they find shelter from the winter with a band of Crow Indians, only to face starving conditions as weather deteriorates. They join a party of Crow hunters to find The Beast and save the band. As Great Grandfather narrates the story over the summer, Juan and Sophia, now in possession of the medallion, face death themselves in a horrific river accident.

Torn from home in a savage attack by Barbary Coast Pirates on an Irish fishing village, three surviving family members are sold into the horrors of North African slavery. At a time when human lives were expendable, death appears to be their only release.

Returning to North Africa, the O'Shea family is swept up in a vicious plot to annihilate their closest friends. Forced into a desperate race against time, they are opposed by the mighty power of the brutal Ottoman Empire.