"Willow" deals with temptation and lust, and concerns a knight returning home from a ten-year war who has his battle-hardened indifference and contempt changed by a beautiful women and her daughter. "Mech" looks at high-tech policing in the future. Two of the stories are set in Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe: "The Sandman, the Tinman, and the BettyB" takes place in the vicinity of Pell Station and concerns the crew of space prospectors and miners and their encounter with an inert rogue missile fired by an unknown warship in a decades-ago war; "The Scapegoat" sees an unusual truce formed between the Union, the Alliance and Earth to deal with the Elves, a technologically inferior alien race that insists on launching suicide attacks on any human ship in sight.