Winner of the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel

A young shepherdess, drawn home from the fields by the haunted certainty that something is wrong, discovers her world utterly destroyed, and in the process unleashes depths of magic within herself not even she suspected.

Dragged by strangers into a life she detests in a city where she doesn't belong, she reveals lies of history, monsters disguised as allies, and a secret the grand city that claims her has foolishly hidden---a secret that will destroy it and its inhabitants if she and her few tenuous allies cannot reverse the deadly threat wild magic has set free.