Jaro Fath has been troubled by visions all his life: a garden, a menacing man in black, a woman screaming. Voices fill his head sometimes, saying words that Jaro cannot quite understand.

Jaro is an orphan, but he had been adopted under mysterious circumstances by the Faths, a scholarly couple who loved him dearly. They raised him on the planet Thanet, where they gave him everything he could ever desire - except one thing. They would not tell him about his origins, always saying that the time was not yet right.

But the Faths were killed on the world of Ushant, bystanders and witnesses of an act of ritual self-destruction by one of their more radical colleagues. Jaro was left their sole heir, but without the legacy he truly wanted - his identity.

He now finds himself threatened on all sides by men who wish to exploit or, worse, kill him. His friends are few - a young woman named Skirlet, who has very high social status but very little wealth, and a mysterious man who calls himself Evan Tarr. Tarr knows something, it is clear, and now he has encouraged Jaro to abandon the life his adoptive parents had planned for him, and to set out on a quest to discover his identity.