A meticulous Compact mage and her archivist husband are sent to assess a remote mountain kingdom's petition for membership, only to find that the kingdom's formidable Chancellor has engineered the entire process to legitimise a secret sale of its vast caelite reserves. As they quietly dismantle her scheme, the mission forces them to reckon with subtler deceits closer to home - the careful ways two precise, private people have been managing each other, and what it costs to finally stop.