The king's closest friend and confidant, his chancellor, Thaddeus Clegg, was raised with Leodan. Thaddeus has a secret, one that has turned him against his old friend. He has recently learned-with Hanish Mein's scheming assistance-that the Akaran family was responsible for the death of his beloved wife and infant child years earlier. It was not a crime Leodan had any part in, but learning of it bitterly twists Thaddeus against the king. When a soldier arrives to warn the king of troop movements in the far north, Thaddeus kills the messenger, thereby buying his distant ally Hanish crucial time to unleash his surprise attack.

And what a multipronged attack it is! Thasren stabs King Leodan with a poisoned blade during a banquet. Hanish's other brother, Maeander, leads one army sweeping down from the northwest. To the northeast an alien race, the Numrek, fight savagely on the Mein side. All around the Known World, Meinish soldiers conscripted into the Acacian army rebel. Hanish himself drags a navy across the frozen tundra so that he can launch the boats on spring-flooded rivers and appear suddenly in the Inner Sea, in the heart of the Acacian Empire. In addition to all this, Hanish unleashes a contagion that sends the vulnerable Acacians into writhing agony. And he slaughters them without mercy.

Caught off guard by the sudden fury of the attack, Acacian authority collapses. On his deathbed, Leodan calls on his old friend Thaddeus to enact a plan they had discussed years earlier. Despite everything, Thaddeus agrees. His love of the children is too great for him to hand them over to Hanish Mein. Instead, he sends the children out into the far reaches of the empire, escorted by lone guardians, to be hidden. The hope is that they will grow to maturity in safety and one day reunite and win back the empire.