I'm not sure I can come up with a capsule description for this book. It started out really well, introducing Brenden, a young man who has suffered a terrible series of losses in the past two or so years, leaving him isolated and adrift. But he has a talent with plants and healing, and one day a woman named Od appears and tells him to go to her school in the city. He does ... and then practically disappears from the rest of the book. The next chapters introduce Arneth, son of the City Warden; Mistral, daughter of a powerful traveling magician; Sulys, daughter of the king; Yar, a professor at the magic school; and ... I might be forgetting someone, but I honestly don't care if I am. The POV's kept bouncing around, so that I never felt very deeply involved with any of the characters, or invested in any of the story lines, which dwell too much on politics and power and not enough on the magic promised in the title and the first chapter. The magics in this book are varied and fascinating, but they seem to be there more for decoration than as any actual contribution to the plot or worldbuilding. I think I would have loved this book had it been expanded and written as an adult novel, with a more complex examination of both the politics and the magic, and deeper insights into each character. Instead, it's kept very young-feeling and far too light and surfacey in tone for what the story seems to be about. I spent most of this book wishing I was reading a similar but very different book. Sigh. I've loved some of Patricia McKillip's other books, so I'm writing this one off as a blip, and possibly I just wasn't in the right mood for it.