Listening at the Gate By: Betsy James

    In the village that she lives in Kat, has been scorned for her fiery red hair, legacy of her fathers shameful marrige to a native woman. While her father is out she finds a young man that has been washed up on the beach just outside her house. She takes him in and trys to care for him, and falls in love.  When her father goes as far as trying to make her marry a man she does not love. She goes to Nall hoping he'll take her, but he doesn't. She goes to her mother's people in the mountains. Kat is an outsider, someone her aunt and cousins love desperately but cannot understand. her only true home she feels is with nall. But Nall is an outsider too cast out by his tribe. 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 boundryof all, to the gate where the world was born.