Miranda Popescu is a teenage girl living in a quiet Massachusetts college town. She is also a princess. Because she is at the fulcrum of a deadly political battle between conjurers in an alternate world where "Roumania" is a leading European power, Miranda was hidden by her aunt in our world. There are many in our world and in Roumania working to protect or to capture Miranda: her Aunt Aegypta Schenck, versus the mad Baroness Ceaucescu in Bucharest; the sinister alchemist, the Elector of Ratisbon, who holds her true mother prisoner in Germany. This is the story of how Miranda and her two best friends Peter and Andromeda are brought back to her home reality. Each will be changed in the process - and all will have much to learn about their true identities and the strange world they find themselves in.