Professor Tikaya Komitopis isn't a great beauty, a fearless warrior, or even someone who can walk and chew chicle at the same time, but her cryptography skills earn her wartime notoriety. When enemy marines show up at her family's plantation, she expects the worst. But they're not there to kill her. They need her to decode mysterious runes, and they ask for help in the manner typical of a conquering empire: they kidnap her, threaten her family, and throw her in the brig of their fastest steamship. Her only ally is a fellow prisoner who charms her with a passion for academics as great as her...

Ridge, Sardelle, and their comrades may have rescued Tolemek's sister and freed the dragon, but trouble awaits at home. The king is missing, a secret organization is hunting sorcerers, and the capital is more vulnerable than ever to enemy attack. Worst of all, at least from Ridge's point of view, someone put that jackass Colonel Therrik in charge of the flier battalion. Ridge and his allies have a lot of problems to fix, but they can't show their faces in the capital without being arrested or shot. This time, it's going to take a lot more than magic to save the country.

Everyone knows dragons have been extinct for over a thousand years. Everyone is wrong. At least one dragon remains, and military scientists from the Cofah Empire are experimenting with its blood, using the magical substance to power deadly new weapons that could be used to bring the world to its knees. That's a concern for Zirkander, Cas, and the rest of the Iskandians, but all Tolemek wants is to find his missing sister. The last time he saw her, their father had locked her in an asylum because of a mental illness with no cure. Now the military has taken her. What use the Cofah have for her,...

It's been a week since the dragon Morishtomaric fell, and Sardelle is not convinced that Ridge is truly gone. With a companion who thinks he's a god and a soldier who would happily kill her, she heads back to the mountains to look for signs that Ridge survived. What they uncover threatens to destroy their country and all they care about. Meanwhile, the Cofah emperor is furious with Iskandia over the loss of its airships and still has a bounty on Tolemek's head. King Angulus sends Tolemek, Cas, and Kaika on a daring mission that could solve both problems... or leave them all dead.