You leave your lovely, tolerant peaceful kingdom to go north for just five minutes and when you come back everything's gone to hell. When Wynter and her father come home after a few years in the Northlands, there's gibbets everywhere and a missing prince and nobody's allowed talk to cats or ghosts without ending up in one of the gibbets and the royal bastard is about to become the royal prince whether the royal bastard wants it or not, and if he objects his very good friend may end up in a very uncomfortable chair. Wynter and Razi and Christopher find things fairly uncomfortable as it is, brutally forced into a corner, they are faced with fewer and fewer alternatives.

With three strongly-drawn characters caught up in an ever tightening noose, this is a tense and dramatic story of politics and court intrigue and personal survival in a claustrophobic world going to hell in a handbasket. Top-notch fantasy.