Britain is ruled by Equals, people from birth endowed with the magical Gift. A gift is a reliable shield, a powerful weapon, and a means of coercion. Commoners can only meekly serve. Each of them is obliged to give ten years to "free work" in special cities with difficult working conditions - this is how the comfortable life of the aristocracy is ensured. But this was until recently. Now a wave of resistance threatens to sweep away the centuries-old order. And Midsammer Zelston, the niece of the treacherously murdered chancellor who advocated the abolition of slave labor, leads the Midsammer Uprising. And only one of the Equals, young Silyun, a strange and unpredictable person who knows how to cross the threshold of death, seeks not to conquer the world anew, but to change it with the infinite power of his Gift.