Join Sam Clarke and Carrots the donkey as they stowaway on board a ship bound for the Crimea and Sams father, Colonel Hopwood. Follow them through the streets of Constantinople and the docks of Balaclava, where Sam and his new gypsy friends take on cutthroats and bandits. Lie low in the Valley of Death as they witness the Charge of the Light Brigade, and pray with Sam that his injured father will somehow pull through. As Sam helps tend the woundedwith Florence Nightingale at the hospital in Scutari, and right on the battlefields with Mary Seacolecan do you, like him, sense him being called to a future in medicine? Sequel to Sam and the Glass Palace.