The expedition presses deeper into uncharted territory, the malformed dragons and their keepers struggling upriver aboard and alongside the liveship barge Tarman in search of the fabled Elderling city of Kelsingra. The journey is brutal: shifting, acid-laced waters, flood and disaster, and a wilderness that has swallowed earlier travelers without trace. As the keepers tend their dragons through hardship, the contact transforms them, their skin scaling and changing as they slowly begin the passage toward becoming Elderlings. Bonds tighten and tangle: Thymara navigates the rivalrous attentions of the young men around her, including Tats and Rapskal, while questioning the freedoms and limits of her marked life. Alise and Leftrin's mutual feeling deepens against the constraints of her distant marriage. But not everyone travels in good faith. Sedric's hidden scheme to harvest dragon blood and parts for Chalcedean buyers comes to a head, and a traitor in the company means to exploit the dragons for profit, drawing danger inward as well as from the river. Continuing directly from Dragon Keeper, which was the first half of the same manuscript, this volume brings the company within reach of their goal and resolves the opening arc of the series, its slow build punctuated by the ongoing wry exchanges of the distant bird-keepers.