What if everything you believed, and even the life you led, was a lie? This is what twenty-four-year-old heiress Charlotte Demerayes has to face in the early 1900s. Innocent and naïve, Charlotte comes of age rapidly when her evil and hateful mother indentures her as a slave in another country, only to have her wicked plans foiled by Charlotte's adoring father. Sailing on the high seas toward a new life, Charlotte encounters romance for the first time, and even more duplicity, only to land in a country that is a throwback to the Renaissance era. Here she learns the truth of the Fanaman Curse and her own nobility, as she struggles to adapt to a world of secrets, trickery of the mind, hatred, and the supernatural, devised by her mother, the Mistress of Fanaman. But how can she survive the Fanaman Curse?