Peter Scudamore, a former captain in the Royalist Army, has unwittingly become a tool in a game much larger than it seems. When Peter assists the English Queen in her escape to Paris, he finds himself caught up in the machinations of the infamous Corvay, a man determined to be the final word in espionage - and becomes friends with the enigmatic Guyon de Chesnay, a scholar and tutor of debate at the Sorbonne. Guyon's service, too, is eventually bought by Corvay, but at a price he is unwilling to disclose, and which is directly linked to the Archbishop de Retz of Paris. As the two men fight to survive the intrigues of Court and Church, and those of a man who wants to gain power in his own right, they grow closer to each other in ways that neither one would ever have expected.

"Spanish alliances and heretic blood and legends of the devil's brood." Paris, February, 1646. Reports come from England and the Royalist camp that dismay the exiled English court, while one man is profiting from both loss and victory. Luc Corvay, the spy master of France, holds lives and reputations in his power, and cares for nothing but his own influence. In an attempt to extend it, he sends Peter Scudamore and Guyon de Chesnay, his unwilling agents, to bring the Languedoc and its hidden allegiance with Spain into open disrepute. But Peter and Guyon's loyalty does not belong to Corvay, and their true goals are the precise opposite to Corvay's intent. They seek the Languedoc's acquittal from the crimes Corvay seeks to prove it guilty of, and their own salvation. And the price of it will prove to be greater than they or Corvay could have imagined.