Silver Eyed Irissa, the Torloc Seeress, has been searching for her people and their homeworld, Edanvant, through years, through Gates between worlds. Accompanied by Kendric the Wrathman, the human skeptic who, by bed bond, has gained the magical powers he utterly distrusts, Irissa finds an Edanvant far bleaker than she hoped - a family that is not a family, a people divided against itself, a planet walled and threatened.

Evil wizard Geronfrey seeks the very essence of lovely Irissa, and the baby she carries. Kendric enters Geronfrey's tower to confront him and vanishes into the magic land of Rengarth. Now Irissa must risk her life in the enchanted kingdom to save her love's life.

Middle age is creeping up on the Torloc seeress Irissa and her husband Kendric, Wrathman of Rule, in the latest installment of Douglas' extended fantasy saga. Their teenage children are quite enough to keep them busy as their daughter Javelle resents not having her mother's witchy powers and their son Thane, first Torloc male to inherit magical talent, has to adjust to his fate. After the long-lived seeress is shocked into recognition of Kendric's mortality by his graying hair, Javelle and Thane, with the magic cat Felabba, set out to retrieve their father's only hope, the seventh of the Six Swords of Rule. Carrying less of the heavy baggage of romantic melodrama than previous volumes, this is brisker and more readable, even if it still leans portentously toward shadows and dreams, spectres and dooms.