This is pretty much a fairly standard coming of age story of an apprentice magician's coming of age story as he is given approval to practice magic in the repressive confines of the Empire's distrust of magic and those that practice it. Yan's master is insistent that magic is fading from the world while Yan merely feels that his master is keeping things from him and the land where they live isn't conducive to magic (well, he is still young, and not able to make much of a living from his suspicious neighbours) so Yan decides to travel to the capital of the Empire where he will surely come to the attention of someone who could teach him more but a pirate attack leaves him and a fellow traveller abandoned on the far coast, many miles from anywhere civilised, and if Yan had thought his neighbours back home suspicious, his saviours would have happily left him to die had they known his profession before rescuing him...

Yan finds himself going off on a mission to a distant village to see why it hadn't paid its latest rents but he finds the solution to this problem more complex than any he had thought of and one that means he has to use all his powers to escape from the trap he finds himself in.

I have to admit this was not really the book I thought it was - at one point I was trying to buy as many books dealing with time travel as possible but while this book does deal with alterations in the regular flow of time there is no time travel in the sense I was interested in. Despite that, I did find it rather an intriguing situation (though not enough to buy any other book in the series!). ( )