The foundation of an empire once rested on the secret language of jin-shei and its customs. Connecting women from every walk of life, it empowered every woman who swore the oath. But four hundred years after the flower of that empire, things in that land of Syai, and its captial Linh-an, have changed beyond recognition.

The status of Syai's women has changed. They are now educated, literate, the equals of men. But they have lost their treasure: their own language and their once powerful ability to weave their own fates.

Amais is a child of two worlds, born in a country far away from her ancestral land. Heir to the journals of her poet-ancestress, Amais is taught the women's language by her grandmother - but when circumstances take her back to Syai, she finds a vastly different world from the one that she has been brought up to imagine.

Armed with the clarity of vision of an outsider looking in, Amais determines to reinvent the women's country and bring back the secrets of jin-shei. But just as her crusade begins, she is caught up in a storm of history - the whirlwind of the Golden Rising, a people's revolution that is fated to destroy much that was once valuable, gracious and beautiful - including the last remnants of the treasure Amais has sworn to restore to the world.