Fires of Nuala — Katharine Eliska Kimbriel

For more than 150 years, she has traveled the Seven Systems, slipping in and out of Cold Sleep. She is a free-trader, the aristocracy of con artists, able to fleece the dishonest with their own greed.

The woman is known as Silver, when she is named at all �"- and she may be the finest free-trader living. But even she is not prepared for the reality of Nuala, planet of deadly radiation levels, humans who heal by touch, and the rarest platinum group metal in the known galaxy. Eighty percent of the citizens are sterile, and the wealthy send their children out to seek mates and find others willing to expand the planetary gene pool. A Nualan can smell a lie at fifty paces. Truth, honor �" and their children �" are everything to the people of Nuala.

On Nuala, for the first time, Silver will be forced to use her real name �"- Darame Daviddottir �" and she will walk the thinnest line between truth and lie of her long and varied career.

The scam she’s come to join has just been blown to the skies, along with the throne lines of three separate sovereign nations. Now Darame has just one decision -â€�" which group of Nualans will she support in the days to come? Mere chance threw her into the camp of the Atares, leaders of the largest clan on Nuala. Will she help them? Thwart them? Wait for the dust to settle?

The tipping point may have already occurred. Turns out she’s mentioned in Nualan religious prophecy, and has caught the eye of the last adult male of a throne line. Sheel Atare is a “hot” healer, able to close ripped flesh and draw fever with a touch. A reclusive professor and medical doctor, unprepared to rule, Sheel Atare needs all the allies he can get.

Even allies who may be connected to those who brought down his house.