Seven clans. Seven generations of bad blood. One last chance to get it right.
Grukk of the Ironjaw has fought in enough wars to know the next one will be the last. The human kingdoms are pushing north. The orc clans are splintering. And the ancient Accord that once held his people together is little more than a story elders tell around dying fires.
His plan is insane: unite the clans not through conquest, but through a vote. A single moot where seven chiefs — warlords, zealots, and political survivors — must choose unity or extinction. But the moot is only the beginning. Because the goblins beneath the mountains have their own designs, the humans are not the simple enemy the clans were promised, and someone inside the alliance would rather see it burn than share power.
Deep in the warrens of the Underthing, a goblin spymaster rebuilds her shattered network with three fingers missing and one eye gone. In a field hospital that was never meant to exist, a goblin healer discovers that orc blood and human blood look the same on her hands. On the border, a human knight raised on stories of savage greenskins rides north to earn his glory — and finds a world that makes his certainties crumble.
Nine voices. Nine versions of the truth. Warlords who kill for peace. Spies who betray out of loyalty. Healers who break their oaths to keep them. A pregnant warrior who will not stop fighting. A boy too young to understand what he’s documenting. And an old she-orc who knows she won’t survive what she’s building — but builds it anyway.
The alliance will cost all of them something.
For some of them, it will cost everything.
