Young Nadezhda after graduating college starts working in the orphanage.
Defeating the terrible dragon, the soldier Ivan returns from the war. The Far Far Away rejoices. The king, also Ivan, is very pleased. He awards the namesake with an order with pearls, appoints a field marshal and offers his wife his own daughter Maria Louise. But the soldier suddenly refuses everything.
A palace steward conspires with bandits to kidnap an infant czar's son and an orphan adopted by the czar, replacing the prince with the steward's son. Two decades later the true prince and his foster brother are slaves in a quarry, the changeling grew up as a prince, and his mother has been elevated to the highest position in the state for "saving" the prince, but losing her own child. Then the brothers escape, the changeling prince departs to fight an immortal wizard and vanishes, and the brothers have to deal with the wizard. Which includes stealing a bird-woman from a Mid-Eastern khan and figuring where the wizard's death is.
