Cricket, a dragonet who is immune to Queen Wasp's powers, goes into hiding after stealing the Book of Clearsight.

"Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general--also known as her tough-as-talons mother--has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. But when you're smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away ... because dragons don't bond to 'fragile' humans....

"Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College--Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky. Now the real training begins, and Violet's already wondering how she'll get through. It's not just that it's grueling and maliciously brutal, or even that it's designed to stretch the riders' capacity for pain beyond endurance....

When Starflight, one of the dragonets of destiny, is kidnapped by the NightWings he finds that the kingdom of his birth is a miserable place, full of terrible secrets--and that, with his fellow dragonets too far away to help, the fate of two kingdoms rests in his talons.