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A city. A mystery. An impossible love.

Why would the Head of a great ruling House retrieve a robbed, battered victim left for dead in the streets of the legendary city of Amberlight?

Why would the oracle that guides all House-heads tell her, It matters, if he dies?

What would an outlander stripped of all memory know of cabal and coalition along the River, where Amberlight holds the monopoly of power and wealth?

What threat might he reveal to Amberlight's one, unique possession: the motherlodes of the qherrique; the pearl-rock that gives the River's rulers their most powerful tool?

What could the Head of a great House feel for a nameless stranger, that would make her risk her House and city for his sake?

Is it honor or betrayal that brings war, siege, and the ruin of their every hope?

The answers lie beyond tangles of intrigue and insurrection and brutal warfare, when in the final upheaval they both begin to understand the more-than-human mystery that first brought them together in the streets of Amberlight.

Fighting doubt and convention, beset with great challenge and facing profound change, Tellurith leads her displaced House to a new beginning and a different life in Iskarda - a life that includes men and women as equals.

But the traditionalist Iskardans are outraged by Tellurith's policies and appalled by her love for two husbands: Alkhes - the rough, dark Outlander who brought Amberlight its doom - and golden Sarth, epitome of the urbane men of the Amberlight Towers.

To achieve Tellurith's dream, both must re-shape their lives. To preserve the dream, all three must journey to Dhasdein's imperial capital of Riversend and face deadly menace and perilous machination.

After their shattering departure from Amberlight, Telluir House has begun to rebuild in the mountain village of Iskarda - but even there, River politics remain a threat.

When Tellurith and her consort receive the precious yet harrowing gift of a possible new form of the qherrique, only one solution offers protection for Iskarda and the qherrique both: leave Iskarda. Find the River's Source. The qherrique itself chooses Tellurith a company, of husbands, lovers, old friends and new, and their passage upRiver is accompanied by upheavals and catastrophe wherever they pass.

Nor are things quieter downRiver, or in Iskarda itself. Before she can return, everything Tellurith has worked for threatens to crumble, as war flares along the River, among the fall and liberation of states, including Amberlight. It takes revelation, sacrifice, great loss, and an impossible hope's fulfillment, to bring Tellurith and her company safely home from the Source, to a River that will never be the same again.