Where the seasons last for generations, hard winter makes for hard religion. The worlds of the solar system are the hells through which all souls must incarnate on their journey to Paradise; all, that is, but the Starbridges, nobles who serve to enforce the "divine will." In the lowest slums of the city-state of Charn, a Starbridge doctor and a drunken prince defy the law to bring medicine to the poor and hear the story-music of the refugee Antinomials, a wild people who shun words, infidels pressed to the edge of extinction. As a decades-long pitched battle approaches the city and the Bishop of Charn herself is condemned for impurity, the doctor and the prince will follow their compassion into the heart of a revolution, just on the eve of spring, with its strange and treacherous sugar rain.(This is the first book of the Starbridge Chronicles, and is followed by Sugar Rain and The Cult of Loving Kindness.)