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Winter, 1745. Scotland is losing a war for independence. Robert Maxwell, old enough to remember the collapse of the last uprising, knows that execution or exile awaits him and his family if the Scottish army fails. Desperate, Robert and his fellow soldiers beg for supernatural aid from the daione sìdhe, magical inhabitants of Scotland exiled in ancient times to a parallel plane of existence. The sìdhe ask to negotiate with the Scottish leaders, who rashly enter into a magical contract promising the sìdhe a permanent return to Britain in exchange for their help in the war.
Robert is ecstatic when sìdhe soldiers and magical weapons gives the Scots a temporary advantage, but their hasty alliance lacks stipulations to prevent lone sìdhe creatures from hunting humans, stealing children, or riddling the countryside with hidden portals that can whisk passers-by into parallel dimensions. Worse, the sìdhe leaders seem unable to stop the chaos.
The Scottish leadership work to understand the sìdhe and find a way to coexist. But they find sìdhe are not as disorganized as they appear, and harbour a sinister goal: to end the war on their terms and secure their own claim on Britain, no matter what the cost to their human allies.
Robert is ecstatic when sìdhe soldiers and magical weapons gives the Scots a temporary advantage, but their hasty alliance lacks stipulations to prevent lone sìdhe creatures from hunting humans, stealing children, or riddling the countryside with hidden portals that can whisk passers-by into parallel dimensions. Worse, the sìdhe leaders seem unable to stop the chaos.
The Scottish leadership work to understand the sìdhe and find a way to coexist. But they find sìdhe are not as disorganized as they appear, and harbour a sinister goal: to end the war on their terms and secure their own claim on Britain, no matter what the cost to their human allies.
The story is told through the eyes of four main characters:
- Ina Bruce, a stubborn propaganda writer from the northeast of Scotland, who will do almost anything to get her fellow Scots to embrace their new allies;
- Robert Wardlaw-Maxwell, a quarry worker-turned-soldier from the Scottish Borders who believes that returning James VIII to power will save Scotland from falling apart and save his town from economic ruin;
- Alfred Grayson, a sheltered and idealistic English bureaucrat who gets assigned to investigate the strange events in the North as punishment for annoying the wrong members of Parliament,
- Marian Cameron, a shallow teenager with rare psychic abilities who joined the army to
chase boyshelp her family, and now must serve as a liaison with the daione sìdhe.
