To prove her worth, Ingray devises a bold plan: she spends her savings to rescue Pahlad Budrakim from a high-security prison on Tyr.

Captain Tic Uisine, Ingray’s ride off Tyr Siilas, is detained due to diplomatic pressure from the alien Geck.

When Pahlad discovered this and tried to reveal the truth, eir father concocted the lie about the vestiges being stolen and had em imprisoned.

She declines an offer to become her mother’s heir and decides to return home to focus on her own goals, which include reforming the prison system which once held Garal.

[1] Publishers Weekly lauded its "charm and wit", but faulted it for not "quite hav(ing) the depth and richness Leckie fans might expect".

[2] At the Guardian, Adam Roberts considered the novel to be "intricately, if linearly and rather shallowly, plotted", with Ingray being a "likeable heroine, but not a terribly remarkable one",[3] while at National Public Radio, Genevieve Valentine described it as a cozy mystery that "makes (...) a fitting addition to the Ancillary world" (while conceding that Provenance's characters "do not possess the immediate power of Breq", the protagonist of the Ancillary novels).

[4] James Nicoll observed that the plot is largely driven by "angling for advantage in the next election", and compared it to the works of C. J. Cherryh (albeit with "more transparent" prose and a protagonist who was "not chronically sleep-deprived"), and correctly predicted that it would be a nominee for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novel.