Kirjahaku

Ed Lewis has been dragged to Medieval Faires for as long as he can remember. Now 17, he's sick of the whole scene: helping his uncle make bows, minding the store, and - most of all - translating his mute mother's sign language as she reads runes for a stream of gaga faire-goers. Only one thing makes him come this time, a last chance to impress a certain young woman by winning the archery tournament. It feels like a matter of life and death. All that changes when Ed discovers an ancient, rune-marked arrowhead tucked in his bedroll. He has no idea who put it there and doesn't ask. Angered by his uncle's endless chores, embarrassed by losing the tournament, he buries himself in making an arrow for his find. What he creates is beyond his ken, for the arrowhead is a gate-key to another world, his mother's world, locked in battle between her people and its old masters, a war chief and druid witch of the Britons. It's the world where his father was lost, and mad harpers pluck illusions from their tunes. A world where there be monsters, for Beowulf's saga is fresh and real. A world of magic and war, where skill, wit, friendship, and a healthy dose of fear solve riddles that reveal the true nature of life and death.

It's 1853, Boston, Massachusetts, and young Finn O'Neill is learning the trade of a boatman on the harbor. He and his father row for a young clock mender, Peter Jenkins, ferrying him out though the ship channels every day to offer inbound shipmasters his services for their chronometers. One morning, a sea-going Chinese junk appears out of a thick fog and sets Finn's life on its ear. The junk carries Matthew Lawson, a Boston merchant who disappeared in China over 50 years ago but looks hardly a day older. And his half-Chinese daughter, An-Ming - smart, commanding, and headstrong as a Malay pirate. Mr. Lawson hires Peter to repair his fantastic Chinese clock and to build a new one as precise and sturdy as a chronometer. Through Peter, Finn learns that the clock is the key to Mr. Lawson's apparently endless life. But Finn's own life isn't so easy. He's Irish, poor, and the son of Da O'Neill, a moody man with a fondness for drink, a penchant for brawling, and a worsening cough that rattles deeper in his chest every day. An-Ming becomes Finn's friend and confidant, only to become the focus of several violent attempts at abduction. In the final incident - played out within the city-wide excitement surrounding the launch of the world's largest clipper ship - Da O'Neill and Peter are shanghaied. Finn himself barely escapes with the unconscious An-Ming. Using his knowledge of the channels and tides in the harbor, he is able to save Peter from a long trip to Africa. Rescuing his father proves much more difficult, then Finn must face losing him again to disease. Desperate, he steals the amazing new clock Peter has just finished, hoping he can figure out how to make it work for his father, and keep himself free from the thugs chasing An-Ming.

Fireboy has earned barely half the money he needs to pay off his mother's bond and reunite his family. Gambling all, he ships a cargo for the baron who holds his mother's bond. His journey takes him to the bemagicked rapids of the High Reach, risking boat, friends, and his own free will, unless he can discover which bonds really matter.

Bad luck seems to follow Ewan Gilmore, a crewman on the steam liner Isle of Lewis. It's a blot that makes him a pariah among the crew. Now, about to be left behind on the pier, he gets one last chance to prove himself - to masquerade as a passenger and serve as secret bodyguard for a certain Professor Jakub Skovajsa and his gifted daughter, Tereza.The Skovajsas are being deported under a cloud of grief, suspicion, and fear. Not even they know exactly what happened during the professor's last experiment; he claims to have lost all memory of it, and Tereza can't - or won't - reveal what she knows. But somehow it killed a squad of soldiers, a general, two congressmen, the Secretary of War, and Mrs. Skovajsov , Tereza's mother. They're both still shaking from the trauma. Meanwhile, rumor has spread that the professor was working on a secret weapon that would end all wars, and still has a prototype hidden away. The public want them gone, the press wants the full story, and agents from more than one country would kill for the prototype.No other ship will take the Skovajsas, but the Isle of Lewis can't afford not to. As passions rise on board, the Lewis steams eastward into a maelstrom of stowaways, shysters, spies, death threats, traitorous allies, and a raging hurricane, with the mystery of the Bell Cannon at its eye.