After nearly four years of evading capture, Leida of the Glimmer South stands bound before a tribunal of dragon judges, accused of theft and the illicit use of dragon magic. Once the favorite of the dragon lord, Magnus Silverclaw, she faces punishment for a crime considered high treason among dragons. Leida is still deeply in love with Magnus but refuses to divulge her reasons for why she stole from him and left without warning four years earlier. Only the threat of enslavement makes her reveal a carefully guarded secret, one that can either reunite her with Magnus or tear her from him forever...

Alaric has never forgotten nor stopped loving the human woman he left in a dusty village almost a decade earlier. So when he meets her again on the cliffs, wearing old dragon armor and playing her fiddle as if her heart would break, he is overjoyed.

But Elsbeth never knew the man to whom she had given herself was only an illusion for the wyvern. Alaric must convince her that the heart of the beast is no less devoted than the heart of the man, and that leaving her a second time will not last another decade.