Sidney’s wedding day doesn’t go quite as he’d planned. When he’d bothered to imagine it at all, he’d thought of a nice June wedding in Nova Scotia, outdoors with the sun streaming down. He hadn’t imagined this hurried affair on the tarmac on a rainy and unseasonably cool day in early September, a month after his twenty-fifth birthday.

In the wake of intracity warfare, Jiang Cheng finds himself engaged by proxy to Nie Huaisang in an effort to build ties between their sects. The fragile peace is short-lived, however, and with the strands of magic and the alliances that hold the city together fraying apart, Jiang Cheng must decide where he stands in order to save what he loves.