Rose Greenleaf dreams of becoming a bard and making her mark on the world. Her mother, Gerta, sees her daughter as a hopeless spinster at seventeen with abysmal cooking and sewing skills. With devious machinations worthy of the devil himself, her mother betroths Rose to her husband’s new partner. Just to escape the coming nuptials and prove her own musical worth, Rose’s headlong flight runs her into the hands of slavers, a master spy, a dispossessed prince, a soul-sucking changeling, and into the middle of an insidious plot to take over a kingdom - a much more preferable choice of perils.