Tradition demands that King Sharn Am Zor conduct himself with all the pomp and circumstance befitting a king of Chameln, but underneath the fine jewelry and the beautifully embroidered tunic he secretly hates, Sharn remains an impulsive, restless young man. After the suggestion of marriage provokes an angry outburst from Sharn during a formal ceremony, his beloved cousin and co-ruler, Queen Aidris Am Firn, promises to draw up a list of suitable maidens. To everyone's surprise, Sharn not only listens to her counsel; he proceeds to confidently select a princess from the land of the Eildon to be his wife. But courtship is far more complicated than Sharn had originally imagined, for in Eildon, neither the land nor the people are as they appear. While Sharn must compete against other suitors for the hand of the princess, the loyal companions who accompany him are faced with a series of magical attacks that begin as petty pranks but soon escalate into outright hostility with potentially fatal consequences. As Sharn nears the end of his quest, however, he learns that this predation may be the least of his problems.

About the Author: Cherry Wilder was an important writer of science fiction, fantasy novels, and short fiction in the last quarter of the twentieth century. A writer whose work both entertained and also challenged rigid social mores, her best-known works are the Rulers of Hylor trilogy--high fantasy comprised of A Princess of the Chameln, Yorath the Wolf, and The Summer's King--and the science fiction first-contact Torin trilogy: of The Luck of Brin's Five, The Nearest Fire, and The Tapestry Warriors. A native of New Zealand, she used Maori folklore and legends to inform the background of the Torin trilogy.

Wilder's novels and short fiction, ranges well beyond epic fantasy and hard science fiction to include dark fantasy, horror and the Weird, as well as mysteries and thrillers. Cruel Designs, a contemporary dark fantasy novel, evokes horror by its allusion to people and events in a house in Nazi Germany, the consequences of whose actions cast a dark pall over the residents of the house decades later. Her novel The Wanderer, co-written with Katya Reimann, is the first in a projected trilogy entitled Secrets of Hylor.

Cherry Wilder lived for some years in Australia before moving to Germany with her husband, Horst Grimm, and their two daughters. In 1997 she returned to her native New Zealand, where she stayed until her death in 2002.