Pureblood family based in Charleston, South Carolina. A longstanding feud with the Hamilton family might have petered out, except that the last Hamilton married into the Careys and a branch set up shop in the old Hamilton stamping grounds. As all except Anthony Carey IV were of Hamilton stock - thanks to his wife's blood - the St. Martins made them the new focus of their feud.

The family estate, Magnolia Grove, is both home to the core of the family and the site of the Magnolia Ball, an annual event celebrating the end of the family reunion and the reentrance of the St. Martins to society. Both the house and the ball were established by Brian St. Martin, an irritable, sickly wizarding governor of South Carolina who left everything to his eldest son, Julian. Julian, father of eight legitimate children, was embittered by the cutting-short of a promising political career after the death of his eldest son, Julian II and by his failure to find husbands for his two youngest daughters. The second son, Alban, married his first wife Christine shortly after his father's death and had four children by her. After her death of dragon pox, he married widow Eileen Carey (née Robinond), with whom he had one daughter.

His eldest, Natalie, was widowed while pregnant and now lives with her younger son, Phillip. Roland, the heir, still lives at Magnolia Grove, as do his wife Sarah and their three children, twins Alexandra and Lila and son Alban II. Julian St. Martin III, the second son and a self-proclaimed genius in the field of potions, and his wife Anna, despite having a house of their own, live at Magnolia Grove, where Julian spends most of his time in his potions laboratory. Their only child, Julian IV, died in a drunken duel on his twenty-first birthday, leaving his then-infant daughter Melisande as Julian III's heir. Melisande lives with her mother, Lucy, and Lucy's mother Annett in West Virginia. Taylor, Alban and Christine's youngest, was married to Miss Emma Carey in an effort to end the Charleston Carey - St. Martin feud. The effort failed, as they loathe each other, but they produced two children, Julian St. Martin V and Lydia. They also live at Magnolia Grove, having no estate of their own.

Alban and Eileen's daughter, Mary Elizabeth, was brought up as the spoiled baby of the St. Martins until her father's death, rumored to have been by poison, when she was sixteen. Her mother, sole matriarch after Alban's death and more partial to the son of her first marriage than to the daughter of her second, disowned her a year later for eloping with John Wright, of the California Wrights, a virtual nobody. Mary's half-brother Alasdair, already at odds with Eileen concerning his own less-than-advantageous marriage, used this as an excuse to side with the Charleston Careys over his own mother, a near-warlike conflict that seemed to evaporate when the deeds to several properties left to Mary by Alban disappeared. Mary was, for the most part, forgotten by society...until her death left her former mother as her daughter's caregiver.