On the steppes of Mongolia, an old woman wrestles with an unknown power

The dream is always the same: Killers are riding against the Mongol camp, and Khokakhchin must run to rescue the horses before a wall of fire swallows them whole. She wakes, remembering when a trader offered her the Eye of Flame—a disk that could conjure fire—and shudders in fear of the power that lies within her. In the camp of a Mongol tribe, the home of the boy who will grow up to be Genghis Khan, Khokakhchin must confront that power, lest the whole world be consumed by fire.

In the haunting title novella, Pamela Sargent evokes a lost world whose values are not so different from our own. This and the other stories included in this volume, set in the past and the present, show her to be a deft writer at the top of her form.