This book takes up the story of the children of Sorcha, who saved her brothers whom a sorceress had enchanted into swans, and Hugh, the Briton she married Her daughter Liadan is a gifted seer and healer who thinks, in spite of her visions, that she knows what the future has in store for her—caring for her dying mother and then an alliance marriage to Eamonn A chance meeting on the road carries her off to care for a dying man—one of the mercenaries of the sinister Painted Man, Eamonn's arch-enemy and a killer for hire Liadan discovers that she cannot choose where she loves and that she and the Painted Man are as bound up in destiny as her mother and father were before her