The whole series is set in a fantasy version of Bohemia during the Hapsburg empire. In this version, many of the people have magical talents. The talents, however, tend to be fairly specific and each individual only gets one. So for example, a talent could be making magical objects out of glass or being able to see the future, but in the normal course of things a person could not have both.Petra (who has a metal gift and mind magic!), Neel (who has ghostly spectral hands), and Tomik (who has a gift for glass) escaped the evil Hapsburg prince in book one and the enigmatic and half sinister English spymaster, John Dee, in book two. So book three opens with the three on route to the Vatra, or Romani homeland.
Neel quickly gets embroiled in local politics while Petra searches for a cure for her father who was turned into a monstrous gray man by one of the evil prince's lackeys. Poor Tomik is still hopelessly smitten with Petra. While nothing happens the way the three expect, Petra is soon executing a plan to track down a cure while Neel tries to avoid assassination.
A good end for a trilogy brings back most of the characters and wraps the overarching conflicts. If it's a very good conclusion, it can stand on its own as a book and be enjoyable even if the preceding books haven't been read. This is a very good conclusion.
While I've mentioned before that I'm not a big fan of the "one girl must pick between two boys" motif that has been so common just lately, Rutkoski manages it about as elegantly as I've ever seen. All the characters reach a meaningful resolution and it's one of those bittersweet cases of a perfect ending. Wonderful ending, but there's no room for more in the series.
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