"When Sophy Dunbarron, the king's illegitimate daughter, assumes the throne, she must learn to embrace her own powers in the riveting conclusion to the trilogy that began with The Waking Land and The Memory of Fire. Sophy Dunbarron has always felt like an imposter. Separated from her birth mother, raised by parents mourning the loss of their true daughter, and unacknowledged by her father, Sophy only desires one thing: a place and a family to call her own. But fate has other ideas. Caught up in Elanna Valtai's revolution, Sophy has become the reigning monarch of a once-divided country--a role she has been groomed her whole life to fill. But wearing a crown is quite a different thing to actually keeping a crown. With an influx of magic-bearing refugees pouring across the border, resources already thinned by war are stretched to the breaking point. Half the nobility in her court want her deposed, and the other half question her every decision. And every third person seems to be spontaneously manifesting magical powers. When Elanna is captured and taken to Paladis, Sophy's last ally seems to have vanished. Now it is up to her alone to navigate a political maze that becomes more complex and thorny by the day. And worse, Sophy is hiding a huge secret--one that could destroy her tenuous hold on the crown"-- Provided by publisher.