Angry that her father has left, twelve-year-old Alice swears that she will live in her family's old Renaissance tent until he agrees to return; but after she meets her mute four-year-old neighbor Piper she finds herself becoming involved in the child's life--and when she hears the little girl speak a word for the first time in years she sets out to prove to Piper's parents that the dismal diagnosis they received for their daughter may be all wrong....

Isabel has been sheltered in a high-society world. All that changes, when she breaches an invisible barrier, and steps into a magical and dangerous city where war rages between the fairies of the Seelie and Unseelie Courts.