It takes farmer's daughter Fawn and Lakewalker maverick Dag back to her home farm as a first step on their 'honeymoon trip' to the Southern Sea, which is analogous to the Gulf of Mexico in The Sharing Knife series' alternate-world setting.

Hod happens to owe much of his sloth and sly theft of edibles to a well-grown tapeworm, not suspected by his employer and only noticed in passing by Dag.

The core of the novel is set on a flatboat, patterned on craft used in the middle 19th century to move goods downstream on America's navigable rivers, and large enough to need a crew of around eight (and with space for cargo, chickens, a goat, and Dag's horse).

For the details of this pre-steamboat era Ms. Bujold has drawn from a number of histories and biographies, listed and annotated in an Author's Note page at the very end of the text.

Like the rest of the series this is a romance, but one that rides on deeper questions of personal and social relationship, including those of leadership, honesty, caste relations and power.