The Ruby Circle recap

Sydney and Adrian are married and sheltering at the Moroi Court, safe only inside its boundaries while the Alchemists wait outside for Sydney to leave. Then Jill vanishes. Adrian's bond tells him she is alive but not where, and the official search is limited by exactly the politics that put her in danger. Sydney and Adrian leave the safety of Court to look for her themselves, following the trail through the Moroi world, the Alchemists and the Keepers, the community living outside Moroi law where Olive Sinclair has gone to hide the pregnancy that should be impossible. Sydney's magic, her teacher, and the small creature she and Adrian summoned all matter more than any of the official machinery. Olive's son is born and Olive does not survive; the child is hidden away from everyone who would treat him as proof of something. Jill is found and recovered, and the law that made her life the guarantee of her sister's throne is changed, ending the hiding for good. Jill and Eddie are together at last, Sydney's pursuit by her order is finally settled, and she and Adrian can live openly.

Previously: Sydney Sage, an Alchemist, spent two years hiding Jill Dragomir - the Moroi queen's half-sister, whose existence is the only thing keeping her sister on the throne - at a human school in Palm Springs, guarded by the dhampirs Eddie Castile and Angeline Dawes and shadowed by the royal Moroi Adrian Ivashkov, who is psychically bonded to Jill. In that time Sydney discovered she is a witch, was trained in secret by her teacher Jaclyn Terwilliger, learned that the Alchemists' golden lily tattoo carries compulsion, and had hers broken so she could pass as loyal while working against the order. She and Adrian fell in love; her younger sister Zoe found out and reported her, and Sydney was seized and held for months in an Alchemist re-education facility, where she faked conversion to survive. There she found Olive Sinclair, a Moroi restored from Strigoi, pregnant by the dhampir guardian Neil Raymond with a child Moroi biology says cannot exist. Sydney broke both of them out as a rescue party reached the facility, and she and Adrian married in Las Vegas immediately afterwards. Sydney is now a fugitive from her own order, and the only place the Alchemists cannot reach her is the Moroi Court.

Sydney and Adrian are living at the Moroi Court as a married couple, protected by the queen and effectively confined: the Alchemists cannot touch Sydney inside its wards, and are waiting for her to step outside them. It is safety without a life in it - Sydney cannot study, work or go anywhere, and Adrian, back on the medication that steadies his moods at the cost of his magic, has nothing to do but be married. Then Jill disappears. Adrian can tell through the bond that she is alive, and nothing else useful; the guardians' official search is hemmed in by the same politics that made Jill a target in the first place, and the longer she is missing the more precarious the queen's position becomes.

Sydney and Adrian decide that waiting inside the wards is not a plan, and start working the problem themselves. Sydney's magic and Ms. Terwilliger's knowledge give them approaches the Moroi authorities do not have, and the creature they summoned together turns out to have uses nobody anticipated. The search has a second strand: Olive Sinclair, carrying Neil's child, has gone into hiding, because a pregnancy between a restored Moroi and a dhampir is the kind of fact the Alchemists would lock underground and Moroi society would fight over. Neil is not managing either the secrecy or the fatherhood well. The obvious place for someone to disappear into is the Keepers, the community that lives outside Moroi law in the Appalachian backcountry, where Angeline was raised.

The search takes Sydney and Adrian out of Court and into the Keepers' territory, where the group's usual assumptions about law, marriage and status do not apply and where their standing depends on customs Angeline has to translate for them. They find what they came for and rather more besides. Jill's trail, meanwhile, does not lead anywhere simple: it runs through the Moroi world and through the Alchemists at once, and the more they learn about who benefits from her disappearance the clearer it is that this was arranged rather than opportunistic. Sydney's own family becomes part of the problem, and Zoe - who reported her sister and has been living with the result - is the group's only line into the order.

The two strands converge. Olive's pregnancy is far along and cannot be hidden much longer, and the people who want to study her are closing in from more than one direction, while the search for Jill turns from guesswork into a target. Sydney works magic at a scale she has not attempted before, with Ms. Terwilliger's help and at real cost, because ordinary investigation has run out of road. Adrian faces the choice the whole book has been driving at: his medication keeps him functional and takes away the spirit magic that could actually find Jill, and there is only one way to have both problems solved at once. Sydney's confrontation with the Alchemists - and with her own father - stops being avoidable.

Olive's child is born. He is a dhampir, the first known to be conceived between a restored Moroi and a dhampir, and his existence changes what the Moroi believe about themselves and what the Alchemists believe about restored Strigoi. Olive does not survive, and the group is left with a newborn who would be treated as evidence by everyone with an interest in him, and who has to be placed somewhere neither side can reach. Neil has a son he cannot claim. At the same time the search for Jill produces the answer: where she is being held, and who arranged it, and why removing her was worth the risk to the people who did it. Sydney and Adrian go after her without waiting for permission from the Court.

Jill is recovered alive. The problem underneath the whole series is then solved at its root rather than patched again: the law that requires a royal line to have more than one living member is changed, so Jill's death would no longer cost her sister the throne, and there is no longer any reason to hide her. Jill goes back to her own life and to Eddie, who has guarded her from the start and finally stops treating what he wants as a professional failing. Sydney's long conflict with the Alchemists and with her family is settled well enough that she is no longer hunted, and she and Adrian stay at Court, married, sober and steady, with Sydney free to study and Adrian with something to do that he chose. Olive's son is hidden away with people who can raise him unremarked, out of reach of Moroi politics and the Alchemists alike, and Neil has to live with that. The Palm Springs household, thrown together by a hiding assignment, scatters into ordinary lives.

Jill is found alive and brought back, and the abduction that removed her is undone. Because the whole danger to her rested on a single rule - that a royal line needs more than one living member for its claim to stand - the resolution is to remove the rule rather than to hide her better: with the law changed, killing Jill no longer unseats a queen, and the years of hiding end. Jill comes back to her own life, and she and Eddie, who has guarded her since the beginning and refused to want anything for himself, are finally together. Olive Sinclair does not survive: her son is born, the first child known to be conceived between a restored Moroi and a dhampir, and he is hidden away to be raised out of reach of Moroi politics and of the Alchemists, both of whom would treat him as evidence rather than a child. Neil is left with a son he cannot openly claim. Sydney's confrontation with her own order and her own family closes the pursuit that has followed her since her escape, and she and Adrian are able to stop running: they stay at Court, married and no longer in hiding, with Sydney free to study and Adrian steady for the first time in his life. The Palm Springs household scatters into lives its members chose.