Asineth's strength is great enough to bind the gods, and the new king and his companions have little hope against her. Beauty banishes Palicrovol from Inwit, and there begins three centuries of pain and discomfort for the scorned king, three hundred years of bondage for Beauty's three unwilling companions. After decades of fruitless attempts to take back Inwit, Palicrovol follows a vision of the Hart to father a seventh son and tenth child on a farmer's wife. That boy, raised in love by a man not his father, will be weaned on the lore of the Sweet Sisters and the Hart, be given to priests to learn the way of God, and find his poem as Beauty's consort, the Little King. Hart's Hope owes much the Homeric tradition of heroic odyssey.
Gods appear in animal and human guise, manipulating mere mortals to guide the turning of the world.
Fallible tools that they are, Orem, Palicrovol and Asineth are prey to the human weaknesses that make them unwilling co-authors of the very destinies they seek to escape. In the ancient city of Hart's Hope, justice is cruel but mercy is crueler. This novel, as rich in allegory as a Greek myth, deserves to stand with the best of the rest of Orson Scott Card's fiction.