What price does war exact for freedom? This is war through the eyes of survivors amidst bloodied fields of victims. Set during the Civil War, "Free Passage" tells interlinked stories of men, young women & children, whose lives are torn apart by War. Each of them flies in the face of adversity & each triumphs, though in a very different way. It begins with the tragedy of the Maguire twins & introduces Girl, a deaf slave, who finds forbidden love with a good man, her owner's son, only to have War wrench them apart. She flees to seek freedom for herself & her child in Canada. Migrant tinker, Herr Schmidt, seeks across the war torn States to find his missing daughter, Mina, finding instead a runaway slave & an orphaned boy caring for his little brother. The War makes a man of the boy before his time. Mina escapes her captors & lives by her wits, finding her way to safety & a future she could once only dream. EXCERPT, "Girl's Story," Wordgathering, Australia, Dec 2014 & no.71, 2015 Kaleidoscope, USA