Chivaka West is a half-dragon, a former Movrekt soldier who has built a home for herself in what was once enemy territory. Violence and coercion are things she is intimately familiar with. Then there are the arts of trust, safety, friendship, charting her own course both in conflict and in love, and, of course, magic. These are things she is only now learning. And they are not easy lessons. In her new family, Chivaka has some of the best teachers she could ever wish for. Isis Va, her daughter Ezri, and the irrepressible Eben Keth teach her more every day about all the ways life can be more complex and more brilliant than she was first taught. But there are things that she must do for herself. Questions only she can build the answers to. Only she can help the Movrekt people, her people, learn to stop destroying themselves and survive in the different world they have all found themselves in after the disastrous Battle of Philadelphia, the main conflict of the third Dragon Civil War.