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Witch World is a series of five books, along with a half-dozen or so other books set in the same world but necessarily part of the five-book sequence. Andre Norton wrote each of the five books primarily from the point of view of a single person, the person being different for each book, as explained in the outline below.
This book is from Simon's point of view. From the back cover:
Ex-colonel Simon Tregarth was a hunted man - and the hunt was beginning to come to its inevitable deadly end. Tregarth was desperate, and his situation required a desperate solution. His only alternative, however, was wild beyond any imagining - sorcery.
Simon was forced to give himself up to the mysterious Siege Perilous, the ancient Stone of Power. It would judge him, determine his worth, and then deliver him into a world in which his mind and spirit should be at home.
Simon Tregarth's lot would pit him against an uncanny world where the laws of nature operated... differently. Where, in fact, "magic" was science.
For Simon Tregarth there would be no return, he could never escape from the WITCH WORLD.
This book is primarily from the perspective of Simon. In this second book, Simon and his wife Jaelithe have vastly different powers which complement each other. Simon comes from Earth, and can understand the Kolder and their ways as none of Estcarp are prepared to do. Jaelithe, formerly a witch of Estcarp, continues to wield the power which her realm considers natural. From the back cover:
Simon Tregarth, whose own Earthly prowess had won him a throne and a witch-wife in an alien world, knew that both triumphs were precarious as long as the super-science of Kolder held a foothold on that planet.
And his premonitions were right when those invaders from another dimension made their final diabolical strike for total conquest.
Andre Norton's WEB OF THE WITCH WORLD is a terrific novel of scientific marvel, other-world color, and sword-and-sorcery action that will thrill and delight every reader.
To Simon and Jaelithe are born two sons and a daughter, triplets. They are Kyllan the warrior, Kemoc the thinker, and Kaththea the heart and controlled emotion. This book is the story of these three, told by Kyllan. From the back page, and first inner page:
North, East, South, West...
The offspring of Simon Tregarth, half earthling, half witch-brood, realized that they alone could perceive the four directions - for everyone else, there was no East!
It was a blank in the mind, a blank in legend and history. And when new menaces threatened, the Tregarths realized that in that mental barrier there lay the key to all their world... somewhere in the unknown eastward must lie the sorcery that had secretly molded their destinies!
They sought the key to a world's wizardry... Never before in all of Estcarp had there been three like them - Kyllan, Kemoc, and Kaththea - not three, but one, linked by strange forces. They were the forbidden offspring of a witch mother and a man from distant Earth, and as such they inherited unprecedented powers from their parents - and the curse of outcasts from the Witch World.
That was until the Witches needed Kaththea's gifts to bolster their own fading strength, and seized her for their own. But three were one, and Kylland and Kemoc could not relinquish what was a part of them. So they determined to rescue their sister, and flee with her - but where? and how? Could anyone escape the terrible wrath and matchless powers of the Witches? But they were young, unique, untried. They were Three against the Witch World.
Kyllan the warrior, Kaththea the untried witch, Kemoc, whose powers could surpass all others - these are the half-Earthling, half witch-brood family menaced by the sorceries of an unknown enemy.
The burder of the struggle fell to Kemoc, who was forced to summon his untested powers in the battle to match the alien evil threatening the Witch World.
When Kemoc, brother of witches and son of an Earthman, rode out with his weird allies to pursue the conquest of the lost lands of the East, it was to prove the test of his whole purpose for existence.
For there was one among that mixed cavalcade of warriors who was not of them - whose form concealed a different and far more alien menace than any they expected to encounter. That alien in disguise bore Kemoc a very special enmity.
It would take Kemoc the very limit of his inborn warlock talents just to survive the rigors of a war against unknown monsters in an unconquered land - let alone to meet the unsuspected onslaught that rode at his very side.
Kaththea the Sorceress called forth a power such as no longer existed on the distant planet known as the Witch World. It was a power so great that it could destroy all that she loved best - and might even prove to be a greater evil than the shadow itself.
Yet there could be no other choice for Kaththea than to call on Hilarion in the death-naming. For she was a witch deprived of power and she needed a guide to regain her lost skills and her lost world. There was only this ancient one, the opener of gates, with force mighty enough...
"I am one of three who once became one when there was need; Kyllan the warrior, Kemoc the seer-warlock, Kaththea the witch. So my mother had named us at our single birthing; so we were."
Thus opens the final saga of Andre Norton's already classic WITCH WORLD novels. SORCERESS OF THE WITCH WORLD is the dramatic and fabulous novel of Kaththea, sister-witch-protectress, daughter of an Earth-man and an Estcarp Wise Woman.
Kaththea's destiny had yet to be resolved - and in her efforts to regain her knowledge of the forbidden sciences of that strange world we are drawn into a series of adventures which put a fitting and breathtaking climax to his series. It is a full-length novel, complete in itself, of fantastic adventures among strange races and on alien worlds, of high magic and low, and of wizardry and super-science.