Eleanor Arkwright is ten years old when her father brings two wolf cubs home from the wilderness, and from that moment the shape of her life is set. Growing up at Abraham Lake in the Alberta mountains of the 1840s, she is her father's daughter in every way that matters ? patient, observant, and capable of a stillness that conceals, from most people, exactly how much she is taking in.

The enterprise her father Thomas built from nothing is the world Eleanor knows, and she grows into its management with the ease of someone born to it. She speaks four languages fluently before she is sixteen. She understands guests, accounts, and wilderness in equal measure. She can read water, track animals, negotiate with fur traders, and run a dining room that leaves wealthy clients convinced Abraham Lake was built specifically for them. What she is less certain of is what she wants ? for herself, beyond the enterprise, in a life she is increasingly aware she has the power to shape.

The arrival of Ksikksi, a Siksika warrior with a gift for patience that matches her own, begins to answer that question. The arrival of Viscount Edmund Westmorland very nearly ends it.

Westmorland wants Abraham Lake. He wants the land, the reputation, and the future the Arkwrights have built with thirty years of work and sacrifice, and he believes his title entitles him to take it. What follows is a war fought on two fronts simultaneously ? against an enemy with deeper pockets and fewer scruples, and within Eleanor herself, as she discovers