In the sun-scorched hills before Solymer, the holiest city in Kedraya, King Rydric Aldren’s crusading host is dying by inches. His soldiers starve beneath the walls they came to conquer, while inside the city Sultan Seylim ibn Tahir al-Din has food enough to mock them with gifts of bread, lamb, and wine.

Humiliated but not broken, Rydric accepts the insult for what it is: an invitation to peace. But peace demands more than promises. To bind their houses, Rydric offers his daughter, Princess Alianor, in betrothal to Seylim’s son, Prince Zeid.

Alianor is a knight, a zealot, and a daughter of the Revealed Light. She would rather die than be promised to an infidel. Yet Zeid is not the man she was told he was. He has spent his life hiding the body he was born with and the truth that could destroy not just him, but his whole dynasty. Alianor despises everything he represents—his faith, his people, his secret—but he may also be the only person who can spare her the fate she fears most.