The bestselling author of the groundbreaking novels
Under Heaven and River of Stars, Guy Gavriel
Kay is back with a new book, set in a world inspired by the
conflicts and dramas of Renaissance Europe. Against this
tumultuous backdrop the lives of men and women unfold on the
borderlands—where empires and faiths
collide. From the small coastal
town of Senjan, notorious for its pirates, a young woman
sets out to find vengeance for her lost family. That same
spring, from the wealthy city-state of Seressa, famous for
its canals and lagoon, come two very different people: a
young artist traveling to the dangerous east to paint the
grand khalif at his request—and possibly to do more—and a
fiercely intelligent, angry woman, posing as a doctor’s
wife, but sent by Seressa as a spy.
The
trading ship that carries them is commanded by the
accomplished younger son of a merchant family, ambivalent
about the life he’s been born to live. And farther east a
boy trains to become a soldier in the elite infantry of the
khalif—to win glory in the war everyone knows is coming.
As these lives entwine, their fates—and those of
many others—will hang in the balance, when the khalif sends
out his massive army to take the great fortress that is the
gateway to the western world...