All her life, Kat has known that she does not belong . In her father's village, she is scorned for her fiery red hair, legacy of her father's shameful marriage to a native woman. And in her mother's mountain town, Kat is an outsider, someone her aunt and cousins love desperately but cannot understand. Her only true home, she feels, is with a gray-eyed young man named Nall. . . . But Nall is an outsider too. Cast out by his tribe, he has no place to call home. Can Kat trust his love and make a new life with him, even amid the terror that is spreading around them? For war is breaking out between two clans who both claim Kat's allegiance, and she can do nothing to stop it. When her beloved brother, Dai, is taken prisoner, 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. In the face of chaos that is destroying everything they know, Kat and Nall embark on a dangerous quest -- a journey that will take them beyond themselves and beyond the last boundary of all, to the Gate where the world was born. Beautifully written by Betsy James, the acclaimed author of Long Night Dance and Dark Heart, Listening at the Gate is a sweeping epic of love, identity, and change.

Chapter One Aash, aash,Huss, huss,Shuu, shuu,Aah. Lullaby from Seli. The Rigi. A summer night, black and starry. The wind blew from the west, urging the waves onto the shore, chasing veils of sand stinging and scouring up the beach. The short grass bowed to the east in the darkness, whistled, and bowed again. Underground, though, all was still. In the great warrenhouse of Seli, in a low, driftwood-beamed room that was her own, an old woman sat on a reed mat, spinning by candlelight. A little naked boy lay against her, as near as he could get but for the spindle, watching her hands work. Odor of beeswax, whirr of the spindle, rattle of the whorl in the clay cup. A cricket creaked. Away down the corridors of the warrenhouse the voices of the clan were indistinct. The surf saidsuff, suffon the beach below. As though to herself, the woman sang, Thou art a man upon the land,Thou art a beast upon the deep,Thine the fin that hides the hand,Thine the dream that riddles sleep . . . The boy stirred at his great-grandmother's thigh and whispered, "Ama." "Bij." That was not his real name, just a little name he had. "Ama, I hear the Gate." She frowned. "It is the wind you hear, my mouse. You cannot hear the Gate from here. It is far away, and out in the great sea." "I hear it." "What does it sound like?" He listened, his head raised from her thigh. "Like Tinga." The gray cat sleeping by the fire pit heard her name and opened her eyes. "Shaking," he said. He sat up and shook himself to show her how it was. But he could not purr as fast as Tinga, and he said crossly, "No." "Shu-shu-shu." Hisamapushed the brown curls from his face and looked at the eyes raised to her, gray as rain -- her granddaughter's eyes, which she had gotten from a father nobody knew, a spirit, maybe, or the sea wind, or rain itself. "The Gate is not for you, mouseling," she said. "Leave it to the Reirig." "Why?" "It is his now." "Was it mine before?" "Maybe. But now it is his, and if you meddle with it, he and the elders will take away your skin and your name, and they will kill you." His round face showed only interest. Killing was common, but not the other part. "Take away my skin?" "Yes. The skin of your seal, the one that your father hunted for you when you were born." She pointed to it, folded on the goods pole: a dark, smooth pelt. "They would burn it, and burn your name, and lay you in the caves. You would not be anymore," she said. He gazed at her. "I would still be yournani." "And I your ama." She caught him to her old breasts. "When I am dead, I shall be my seal again and play in the sea; and someday, my nani, when you are old with many children and you die, you shall be your seal again, and we shall play together. Will that be good?" His nodding head bumped her collarbone. "So you must not meddle with the Gate or the Reirig," she said, "for to lose your skin is to lose your seal. You would not be one of the Rigi anymore, only a man, no better than a Black Boot. And then where would your ghost live, eh? In the east with the sun and the seal-killers?" She tried to make him look at her, to be sure he heard. He stood on her thighs with dirty brown feet, looking not at her but westward, where the sea itself shook, the whole world trembled at once. "What is the Gate?" "Tcha!" She lifted him down, turned him round, and spanked his bare bottom. When she was done, he straightened his back and said again, "What is the Gate?" "You are a demon child!" He said nothing. His chin stuck out. "You have seen the Gate. It is two stones in the sea." She took up her spindle again, but the gray stare defeated her, and at last she put the thread aside, muttering, "Better from