Maia Drazhar is the youngest son of the Emperor of the Elflands, relegated to distant country estate after the death of his mother, a Goblin princess. Spurred for his dark skin and yellow eyes, Maia's life is barren and full of suffering. Not long after his 18th birthday he is rudely awakened in the middle of the night with a bewildering message: his father and older brothers have all died in an airship crash; he is summoned to the capital, and must serve as the next Emperor. And so begins a second kind of exile, in the hostile territory of the royal court. His ministers and kin attempt to curry favor to his face, while plotting behind his back. Maia must do the best he can to learn the skills he needs for a job he was never intended to hold. He begins to build tentative alliances and fragile friendships, but all are threatened by a new realization: the death of his father was not an accident, but a murder.

I listened to this story as an audio book and I absolutely adored it; my one trouble with it was that it is packed with fantasy names, and it was at times hard to remember who was who. I ended up keeping a little list on which I wrote down every new character who was introduced. I think I would have had an easier time with the names if I had been reading in it print, but at times my confusion seemed appropriate, as Maia himself was often overcome by the amount of names and faces he had to learn and remember.