The Dangerous Gift

The Dangerous Gift is a fantasy novel by Tui T. Sutherland, part of her long-running sequence about the dragon tribes of a divided world.

Snowfall never expected to inherit the IceWing throne so early, and her plan for the job is simple: keep her tribe inside its own territory, where she believes it is safe, and keep every other tribe outside. IceWing magic stands behind the plan and she is confident that it will hold. It does not, because a storm arrives carrying dragons nobody recognises, who have come to her shore looking for asylum. She finds them strange and, she is certain, completely untrustworthy, and she begins the work of moving them out of her kingdom again. Her plan is backed by every piece of IceWing magic she can find, and the longer she spends in the company of the arrivals the less straightforward it becomes to send them away again.

Everything in the story is filtered through Snowfall's own view, from her first decisions as queen to the point at which the plan she is proudest of stops being useful.