"Renda, you miss the war like an old love, and in the missing, you forget the bad of it. The dead, the maimed. Sure you'd not take it all back.""Would I not?"For Renda of Brannagh, born and raised to be a knight, peace doesn't sit well. Gone is the confident commander in charge of an army. In her place is a woman crude and foreign, a knight in masque as a noblewoman. She wishes for nothing more than to return to battle. Until her seven year old niece goes missing, setting off a chain of events that leave Renda longing for the peace so ardently scorned. The gods bound and chained. Plague.Magic.Prophecy.Renda and her knights fight to save the kingdom from a faceless enemy bent on the ruination of Syon. But through it all, she struggles to combine Renda the knight and Renda the maid, to learn what she lacks, in order to come into her own. For prophecy is a delicate thing.

Byrandia. The land of Syon's ancestors. Land unseen for millennia. Powerful. Unreachable. Renda of Brannagh is in her element again but at a terrible cost. She has seen everything she fought to protect, everything she loved, destroyed in the space of a season. Despite the crippling loss, she knows she will have to sacrifice more, for the only way to win this new war against those who destroyed her home is to hunt them all the way back to theirs: Byrandia. Chul is tired of gods playing with him, tired of no longer knowing what to think and feel about everything he's learned--about his own people and those his people call Invaders. Of reconciling the forbidden knowledge and his people's history--and their future. Gikka wishes she had disobeyed Lady Renda's orders and fought at her side. Now she must rejoin the missing knights, but to have any chance against this mysterious enemy, she knows they must also find her wayward Dith. Dith's power is growing at a fantastic rate and getting harder and harder to control. With the terrible secrets he learned in Galorin's Keep, he knows he must reach Byrandia, no matter the cost. Daerwin is devastated by his losses at Brannagh. But his suspicions about the enemy they face are so terrifying that he cannot afford to face his heartache. He only hopes that with victory comes vengeance. And Trocu Damerien knows that the prophecy is progressing rapidly. The time to return to Byrandia has come.