Romy and her three partners in crime - a sword master, a silversmith, and her thieving brother - have embraced their roles as the Shadow Lord’s agents, using their forbidden magic to accomplish tasks his other spies cannot.

Now, they’ve been tasked with locating a list of powerful men and women pledged to assassinate the tyrant Protector of Mercediare, Cantagna’s most dangerous enemy. Then, they must destroy the list before it falls into the Protector’s hands, where it could plunge the entire Costa Drago into a rampage of murderous vengeance.

But when Placidio and Romy infiltrate the ambassador’s household by impersonating a cloth merchant and an aspiring diviner, they discover that the ambassador’s oddities and the prisoner’s identity signal dangers far more explosive than exposing the Assassins List.