Devastation is suddenly very real. Charlie and Corinth have seen it and felt it since Yaspur the Hard, but never like this. Now "heartbreak" is understood with clarity, and hopelessness invades. But with the God of grace on their side, hope is never actually gone: just delayed. Two lines to the throne, both heirs missing; one poisoned, the other taken by an evil cult. The Dreaded King and his wife are on their trail, but even as they ride they know they are too late. Only a ten-year-old street boy stands between hope and the complete destruction of a line which has carried on unbroken for over a thousand years. But can the toughened Turner Hitchley do anything against a raging poison and a looming plague?.