The Magicians' Guild (The Black Magician Trilogy, Book 1) (Black Magician Trilogy, 1)

We should expect this young woman to be more powerful than our average novice, possibly even more powerful than the average magician. This year, like every other, the magicians of Imardin gather to purge the city of undesirables. Cloaked in the protection of their sorcery, they move with no fear of the vagrants and miscreants who despise them and their work—until one enraged girl, barely more than a child, hurls a stone at the hated invaders . . . and effortlessly penetrates their magical shield. What the Magicians' Guild has long dreaded has finally come to pass. There is someone outside their ranks who possesses a raw power beyond imagining, an untrained mage who must be found and schooled before she destroys herself and her city with a force she cannot yet control. Caught up in a confrontation between the hated Guild magicians and the angry youth of the slums Sonea discovers, to her dismay, that she possesses the same powers as the reviled magicians. To avoid capture, she must seek protection from the city's feared underworld, The Thieves. In return she must use her powers for them, but her magic never seems to do quite what she intends it to .. When the mages of Imardin gather for their yearly purge of the city's undesirables, they are dismayed to encounter a vagrant girl capable of penetrating their magical shields, so they decide that they must teach her to control her extraordinary power The Magicians' Guild attempts to locate an untrained rogue mage, whose raw power and belligerent disposition could prove very dangerous to their order "It is said, in Imardin, that the wind has a soul, and that it wails through the narrow city streets because it is grieved by what it finds there."