On the nameless world settled long ago by human colonists, humanity has spread out. Darius is seventeen and was born and lived all his life in a warm southern climate. Raised as a prince, he conceives the desire to see his maternal relations, who live in and rule a city-state a good distance north of his home. But when disaster strikes on the journey, Darius is forced to travel even farther north, where he discovers his very existence is a kind of riddle to which only a few people know the answer. As he struggles to cope with a new way of living, a man named Daniel the Wanderer, who has hs own secrtets, , befriends him, and a cousin he didn’t know he had teaches him that women are not always meek and well-behaved. All in all, life is very different in the North.
