When a young guardsman appears at their door late one night, Esther Lanark and her family are thrown into a world of fear, war, and ancient, dark magic, a world where firedrakes ravage the land, strange shadowmen stalk the woods, and where a witch from the far north has awoken from her long sleep, to wreak her revenge on the old empire. It is a world that will lead Esther and her brother to make the dangerous journey to the northern lands, far beyond the cities of men, to confront the Witch of Glenaster.

Nearly a year has passed since Esther Lanark fought the Witch of Glenaster, but she is still not safe. As the ward of Lord Fyra, the empire's most powerful man, she has a comfortable life, but is effectively a prisoner, homesick and grieving for those she has lost, until one day an old friend appears, and tells her that Magnus, her brother, may still be alive - and that she is in greater danger now than she has ever been. Esther realizes she has to leave the emperor's citadel and go on the run. But in a world where nothing is quite what it seems, who can she trust, and how will she escape, when so many people seem to want her dead?

Thomas Taper has returned from the nameless lands, to the joy of Esther Lanark and her friends - yet a shadow hangs over him, and over the empire, as news arrives from the capital that the emperor is dead. Many powerful people covet the crown, but none are more dangerous than Lord Anguis, a sorcerer from the Spike Lands, a distant and strange country at the very edges of the known world. As the awful truth about Lord Anguis begins to emerge, Esther and Thomas realize that they must journey together once more, to find a lord from a forgotten house who may hold the key to saving the empire. But this lord has his own secrets, and Thomas, too, is not the man he was - can Esther save him, and herself, from the darkness that threatens to engulf them all?