Five ships of Abertus Skipman's merchant fleet, sailing from Barran in the Ravellan League to the port of Batu in the Xanthian Empire, have been utterly and mysteriously destroyed. Only the panicked telepathic communication of some of the victims and a bit of wreckage floating on the Great Sea provide any clues to the fate of the fleet.
An investigative Council of the Alliance must convene to unravel the mystery, and a suspicious barrier to mind-communication surrounding Essin in the kingdom of Vaaseli inspires the other Allies (Ravella, Albrahar, and Xanthia) to insist that Council meet in the northern capital.
Though the evidence is scant, Magus Dovan, head of the Ravellan delegation to the Council, has his suspicions about the disaster. Twenty-five years before, the Alliance discovered and intervened in a Vaaselian plot to use telekinesis for destructive purposes – a grave violation of the Peace of Alidor. The telekinesis plot was foiled by the combined efforts of Yselle Forester, a junior diplomat from Ravella, and Valmur Karoli, then a security expert for the Vaaselian diplomatic service, now the Lord Chancellor of the Kingdom – a post awarded him by his monarch in gratitude for his work in exposing the plotters, chief of whom was his own father, Lord Helmur Karoli. Only Magus Dovan knows that Yselle had grave misgivings about Valmur's motives in turning his father in – so grave, and so dangerous, she fled Essin in secret before the conclusion of her mission.
Retired from the service, Yselle has never told anyone the details behind her experience in Vaaseli, but has devoted herself to raising her family, especially preparing her daughter, Wythe, for her own diplomatic career. Now Wythe, a new graduate of the diplomatic service school, Is called upon to serve on her nation's delegation to the Council in Essin.
