The Leaves of Fate — George Robert Minkoff

The Leaves of Fate is the third and final volume of an epic fictional chronicle, "In the Land of Whispers." The three books present the extraordinary histories of the hero of Jamestown, Captain John Smith, and the great Elizabethan explorer before him, Sir Francis Drake. Smith's journals record the events of his own life, and reprise the tales told him around the campfires at Jamestown by Jonas Profit, an alchemist who accompanied Drake on his voyages. In this final volume Smith is forced to return to England, never to set foot again in Jamestown. Profit has died, but not before passing along the final scenes of Drake's downfall, as well as that of Profit's teacher, the alchemist John Dee. Despite a subsequent expedition to map the New England coast, Smith is cast aside by the Virginia Company, and reduced to the role of a keening witness, all the while the colonies move inexorably toward becoming a slave economy built around the cultivation of tobacco. In London, Smith's reunion with Pocahontas in England is brief and bittersweet, but despite continuing hardship and neglect, Smith becomes the best-selling author of his time. The first volume is concerned with initiation. The second volume with trial and expulsion. This final volume is the book of exile.