The Red Wyvern: Katharine Kerr

Book I of The Dragon Mage. In Cengarn, Rhodry of the silver daggers - half-elven, half-human - is beset by strange dreams. A dark-haired enchantress, The Raven Woman, is haunting his sleep and he can find no release, not even in the arms of Dallandra, his lover. He does not know that his feud with the Raven Woman goes back over three hundred years, to a time when the throne of Deverry stood under threat of civil war. Then the young king's cousin Lilli was forced by her scheming mother to scry for omens and she saw terrible visions - red wyverns sweeping down from the mountains to fall like hawks on a herd of feeding swine. Were these the imaginings of an untrained mind, or omens foretelling bloodshed and disaster for the clan of the Boar? Cover art by Geoff Taylor.