In The Silver Wolf, Alice Borchardt brought the brutality and decadent splendor of Dark Ages Rome brilliantly to life in the remarkable tale of Regeane, a beautiful young shapeshifter fighting to live and love as both woman and wolf. Night of the Wolf looked back even further in time, to the days of Julius Caesar, when a woman's beauty bewitched a wolf—and awakened the man who had been slumbering for millennia in the beast's savage heart . . . a man named Maeniel, who would become Regeane's soul mate. Now Borchardt takes the saga of these two extraordinary lovers to dazzling new heights of the imagination. The result is a novel of which the pages ring with magic, romance, and adventure—an irresistible call to everything wild within us.The armies of Charlemagne are poised in Geneva, ready to add Italy to their lord's growing list of conquests. On the other side of the Alps, the mercenary forces of the corrupt King Desiderus watch the mountain passes like cats crouched impatiently before the holes of mice. Lying between the two camps is a wild and forbidding land where shapeshifters live unmolested, protected by their leader, Maeniel, and his bride, Regeane. But now the wars of men threaten to undo the careful work of centuries. The human part of Maeniel owes fealty to Charlemagne. But the wolf acknowledges no master.Still, it is as both wolf and man that Maeniel embarks on a hazardous mission for Charlemagne. Captured, Maeniel is condemned to death twice over, as a spy and as a demon changeling. Now, with the help of a Saxon warrior whose love poses dangers of its own, Regeane will brave the icy crags and crevices of the Alps to rescue her husband, only to find that he is the bait in a trap set for her by a villainous man from her darkest past—a man who will stop at nothing to gain the vengeance of which he dreams.But there is another enemy at work. Behind the tangle of ambitions and animosities driving kings and commoners alike, an ancient evil thirsts for a revenge of its own: a revenge that demands the blood of Maeniel and Regeane . . . and of all humanity.