<b>The bestselling author of the groundbreaking novels <i>Under Heaven</i> and <i>River of Stars</i>, 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.</b><br><b> </b><br> 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.<br> <br> 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.<br> <br> 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...
