Livia is the Reader of the Silver Rivers, gifted with the rare ability to discern memories and warnings within moving water. From a shallow silver bowl, she studies reflections that belong neither to the present nor entirely to the past.

Gentle, thoughtful and more courageous than she first appears, Livia avoids courts and crowded halls, preferring the quiet banks where Albion speaks without interruption. Recently, every river has shown her the same impossible vision: a ruined abbey standing whole beneath the moon, its bells ringing below the water. Livia knows the vision is calling someone home – but she has yet to discover whether that person is living, dead or still waiting to be born.