A city built on a buried truth. A merchant queen who has been right and alone too long.

Rosalie Sharone expected Tursim to be a brief layover on her road to Sceotan. What she finds is a city quietly suffocating — its women veiled, silenced, told for generations that the law itself denies them freedom.

But the law isn't what they think. The law has been forgotten.

Beneath centuries of doctrine, in the restricted collection of an ancient library, the city's founding promise still exists — a charter binding every free person, regardless of birth or faith or sex, that the priesthood has spent generations pretending no one was ever owed. And in Sofia Masudo, the merchant queen who built an empire while being told she could not, Rosalie finds the woman who can carry what a city has been waiting for.

Somewhere in the city, an ancient enemy of her dead mother begins to watch.

Rosalie's voyage will continue. What she plants will grow.

The fifth book in the Innatraea series — an epic fantasy saga of diverse kingdoms, constructed languages, mythical creatures, and the women whose buried histories rewrite the future.