Thus, in the northern city of Machi, the andat Stone-Made-Soft makes possible a thriving mining industry. However, the relationship between poet and andat is volatile and potentially catastrophic, and the cities of the Khaiem are all too aware of how the city of Saraykeht fell to ruin when its poet failed to control its andat, resulting in the former's death and the latter's disappearance.

A decade and a half after the fall of Saraykeht, the Khai Machi is dying, and the city waits for a bloody battle among his three sons for control of the throne—a battle sanctioned, indeed encouraged, by tradition. Complicating matters is the presence of a daughter, Idaan, furious and embittered by a patriarchal society that forbids any woman to ascend to political power, and a fourth son, Otah, the "upstart," who has lived in exile for years and become little more than a rumor in Machi. When the youngest of the brothers is killed, suspicion lights on Otah, and, at the request of the surviving brothers, the Dai-kvo, leader of the class of poets, sends an emissary to Machi to investigate.

That emissary is Maati, who trained as a poet but never fully joined the order and who has a complicated prior relationship with Otah. As Maati investigates, he gradually gains the trust and assistance of Cehmai, current poet of Machi, but is unaware of the complicated forces churning beneath the surface: the complicity of Idaan as she struggles to bring her fiance to the throne of Machi; the involvement of the distant land of Galt, which was also involved in the destruction of Sarahkeht; the interior struggles of young Cehmai, whose conflicted emotions and divided loyalties threaten his control of the andat, and therefore the very existence of Machi. When Otah returns to the city and is accused of murder, Maati's investigation becomes a campaign to prove his former rival innocent—an effort that endangers his own tenuous status with the Dai-kvo and threatens to bring to the surface forces that could tear the city apart.

Struggling to survive in an unstable world

As he did in A Shadow in Summer, Abraham uses the epic backdrop of the cities of the Kahiem to tell a story closely focused on a small group of characters: the rivals and friends Maati and Otah, both continuing from the earlier novel, and the new characters Cehmai and Idaan. The author does an admirable job of giving the reader strong, closely focused portraits of these four individuals while simultaneously maintaining a complicated plot of murder, seduction and betrayal.

This fantasy novel is also an open mystery: The reader learns relatively early on who is behind the plot to assume power in Machi, and a good deal of the pleasure of the book is watching the characters as they struggle to discover what is really going on—and as they make often significant mistakes along the way.

The novel is also notable for the degree to which it makes clear that many of the difficulties the characters face stem not from a threat to the system, but from the system itself. Idaan behaves badly, even unforgivably, but why should she not be angry, trapped within a rigid patriarchy in which women are property? The land of Galt is a genuine threat to the cities of the Khaiem, but how can they expect to survive when their prosperity depends on the inherently unstable, even arbitrary, relationship between poet and andat?

Compellingly plotted and elegantly written, A Betrayal in Winter is a very successful continuation of what promises to be a significant and original contribution to fantasy literature.