When the young wizard Aubrey meets the wife of the shape-changing wizard Glyrenden, he does not understand what a strange species of woman he has found. Lilith is a seemingly plain woman, indifferent and cool in her presentation, yet as Aubrey passes his months of tutelage in Glyrenden's house, the wizard's wife transforms his notions of beauty and speech.

Glyrenden's house is a mess of dust and chaos, unaffected by the constant vigilance of the manic housekeeper Arachne, an oddly shaped, incomprehensible woman. Lilith, Arachne, and a slow servant named Orion together offer Aubrey a most peculiar home when Glyrenden is away; when the wizard is home, Aubrey struggles with his growing sense of his teacher's malevolence. As Aubrey and Lilith become friends, her comments about her husband increasingly reveal her loathing for Glyrenden, along with a distinct distaste for her own womanhood. But it is not until Lilith collapses at a harvest festival that Aubrey begins to suspect that Lilith may be stranger than she seems -- not even a woman among women, but something else. It is Glyrenden's own arrogance that finally reveals the housemates' curious origins to Aubrey, origins that define who they are and where they really belong.

In this curious story that harkens back to Daphne's escape from Apollo and to a biblical garden of Eden, Aubrey learns what constitutes love, and what -- if anything -- separates other creatures from humankind. In the end, to free Lilith he must come to embody each form of the earth, and he must give her over to the creature she was meant to be.