Publisher's Synopsis
Publishers Weekly: "A large cast of characters and complex world-building fuel the intrigue and action in this intricately plotted fantasy." There is a place where fabulous clockwork Devices fill Festival streets with color and sound. Where the Gear Tourniers, in their places of high learning, keep alive the memory of the cruel horrors of an industrial past, now overthrown. Where skill of the hand and grace of the body are markers of true belief . . . Elena Alkeson has been on the run for six years. Wanted by the fanatical Duke of Melifax for witchcraft, she is safe nowhere in Devien, as her gift for sensing impending disaster comes with a price: she can't keep her mouth shut. Until she meets Fen, who shares a similar gift: the gift of seeing inside mechanisms and knowing what they do. Elena and Fen must flee for their lives, going to the capital City of Helseve to seek asylum, and, perhaps, a life in which their gifts can be used for good. Amidst the machinery and brilliance of the Autumn Festival, Fen and Elena find friendship, danger, and some powerful allies. But Melifax and his sect, the dour Browns, are determined to bring the people of Devien into a new age, an age of moralism, conformity and mass production, ensuring that the beauty and pageantry of Devien and its Devices will be lost forever.
