Sergey Ionov. A first-class mage-investigator. A capital-city snob who doesn’t believe in ethnic magic.
Ayana Altyn-Basheva. The granddaughter of a shamaness from a small village in the Altai Mountains.
It was Ionov who, three years ago, witnessed the collapse of all of Ayana’s hopes, after which she had to leave the capital’s mage academy and return home. And now Ionov has shown up at her doorstep—he needs help finding people who have simultaneously gone missing from different cities across Russia. He needs the help of someone who wields ethnic magic—and whom he has thoroughly turned against himself.
And he keeps doing it. Completely incorrigible. Absolutely.