Five years have passed since Nahri crossed the threshold of Daevabad and found herself bound to its throne room and its politics. She has made a life of sorts inside the palace — a gifted healer, a reluctant symbol to her father's people, a prisoner in all but name — and she has learned to trade in favors and silence to survive. But the anniversary of a new century is approaching, and with it the city's fragile peace is about to be tested.
Far from the walls, an exiled prince walks the desert he was banished to, only to be pulled back toward the home that cast him out. Beyond the mountains, an old soldier drills a new army for a mistress with her own designs on the brass city. As these paths bend back toward Daevabad, loyalties formed in the first book are strained past breaking, and choices made in the name of family, faith, or love begin to look like the seeds of war.
The second volume of the Daevabad Trilogy deepens S. A. Chakraborty's world of djinn tribes and buried history, moving among three vivid points of view as ambition, grief, and long-nursed grievances gather toward a reckoning. Political and intimate in equal measure, it raises the stakes without ever losing sight of the people caught inside them.