Three orphans who grew up together haven’t seen each other in years. Then they turn up on the same bench, waiting to take the Charter Guild’s final test. The job sounds simple: clear the rats out of two bakery cellars on Baker’s Pass, and don’t get distracted. But these rats eat stone, someone is watching the street, and the baker who wants them gone keeps telling the new recruits not to look in the corners.

The test is over, but the three new recruits brought something up from that cellar that they shouldn’t have kept. Now someone in Port Haven wants it back badly enough to pay for it, and Wex is the only one who knows where it is.

Their first solo contract is a beast in Ravenwood: something tall and scaled that walks into a forest lake as if it lived there. It sounds simple enough. But then the three recruits come face to face with it and Emilie hears what’s going on inside its head.

In the village of Gildingwood, the rain keeps time, the bakery makes nothing but plum pie, and a tiger has turned up on the village green. Nobody has been hurt yet. ...Yet...

Emilie finally gets an answer from Oronos Silvermane: a riddle, sealed with a dragon, and a deadline. Meanwhile the three recruits have an easy courier job: carry four ruby gems across the city, and keep Emilie thirty feet away. Then a cart breaks loose at the top of a hill, and something blue and hungry spills into the street outside the forge.

On a quiet night at the fish farm, Roice and Wex lie on a rooftop and wait for whatever comes up out of the pens. Across the city, Emilie has spent her savings to have her cards read by the woman who runs the Dusk House. Before the night is over, one of them will face a man who won’t put down his sword. Another will hear an offer from a stranger who says he has a great deal to tell.

Roice says the killing was clean, and he needs it to be true. Wex goes looking for a ragged priest in the moon shadows of New Haven to find out who has been talking in his head. The recruits are about to be raised in rank and given new blades, made with the gems they carried across the city. By morning, those blades won’t be what anyone forged.

Something is guarding the north road through Ravenwood: white wolves that glow in the dark, with eyes almost like people’s. They don’t touch travelers. They only kill the bandits who prey on them. The ranger brigade wants to know what the wolves are before they mistake a woodcutter for a bandit. The trail leads to a hill north of the forest, where an old wizard lives in the mouth of a cave that goes down into the dark.

The invitation to the Coral Ball arrives already opened, and Emilie knows who opened it. Oronos Silvermane finally lets her into his house. He has a guest list of seven names, a warning about the full moon, and a gift that will let her read minds unnoticed, for a price someone else pays. On the eve of the party, the three recruits watch a quiet wharf from the rooftops, and a man they thought they understood goes down to the water to meet something waiting under it.

Tonight is the Coral Ball, and the full moon is rising over North Hill. Roice and Wex are working it in borrowed footmen’s livery. Emilie arrives as Oronos Silvermane’s guest, in a gown someone in his house had made to her size, with a band on her wrist that lets her listen to the guests unnoticed. Seven names on a list will be in the ballroom tonight. One of the guests has a mind Emilie can’t read at all.

The Coral Ball goes on, and something cold is moving through the walls of Dunwich Manor. Emilie has already been burned once tonight, reaching into the wrong mind, and the band on her wrist is almost too hot to wear. Upstairs in the gallery, a painting is waiting under a cloth to be unveiled. Outside the windows, seven ropes hang in the dark.

There’s an island in the bay that no one owns, wrapped in fog every day of the year. A ship goes in and out of that fog twice a month, and the harbormaster can’t name it. A sea captain agrees to take the three friends as far as the fog and not one stroke farther. Beyond it, someone is clearing out an island in a hurry, and he isn’t expecting company.

The Kerbers are finished, or at least the ones the friends know of. Port Haven has older secrets. Roice hears that a dog-fighting pit he remembers from his childhood is still running. Emilie starts her lessons with Oronos. A locked strongbox turns out to hold half of an old book, with four names in it and a children’s skipping rhyme they all know.

The Marquis Alaric Goldspire hasn’t been seen since the night the Tower went down, and his neighbors have started to complain about the smell. Than tells the three friends to knock and see if he answers. He does. Under his gutted house, a shaft goes down to a chamber built around a black stone, and every whisper in Emilie’s head knows it. Then a man in clothes from an old portrait walks up out of the dark, and the only one he looks at is Emilie.

Emilie wakes screaming in the barracks, the way she always has, and for once Roice and Wex sleep straight through it. Someone else is in the room. The man from the steps under the Goldspire house has come to introduce himself properly, and he knows about the two shadows that have haunted her dreams all her life. He says he can make them go. All she has to do is help him, and tell no one.