John and Philippa Gaunt, expecting their lives to return to normal after their mother gives up her djinn powers, are drawn into a desperate quest to find five fakirs who hold the keys to the world's fate after its luck tips wildly out of balance.
A rare silver coin and a mysterious red-haired boy seem entangled in eleven-year-old Jacob "Deb" Corey's fate when he is laid up with a badly broken leg on his family's farm in the mid-1800s, just after performing a hex to cure his wanderlust.