The forced labor convoys are no longer a secret that only the frontier knows. The scale has reached the point where even the Elder Continent’s established institutions cannot pretend they haven’t noticed. Marshal Harlan Decker — fifty-four years old, former outlaw, the most respected badge in three frontier territories — has been collecting documentation for months. The documentation is ready. Now it needs someone to use it.

Cody is eighteen, a Highmage-level practitioner who has returned to Trestfall to teach, and who has been known publicly, since Vane’s announcement, as the second prince of Caldrath — the lost heir, recovered. He has declined to act on this. The corporate assembly in Caldrath has filed legal instruments asserting his obligation to appear. He has not appeared. He has lesson plans to finish.

Ben is a wizard, advancing toward mage, and the advancement is costing him in ways he anticipated and ways he didn’t. He is still himself. He checks, regularly. The answer keeps coming back as yes, mostly, and he has decided that mostly is enough.

What assembles is not an army. It is a coalition — frontier towns, independent marshals, a loose network of practitioners who have been watching what Caldrath has been building and have concluded that the Frontier Code cannot handle it alone. Sera Voss is the thread that runs through all of it. Two minions are active in the world: one of The Divine, who is helping people find each other; one of The Foul, who is making the machinery of harm run smoother. Both are convinced they are right. Both, in their way, are.

The confrontation comes at a river crossing. Caldrath’s forces on one bank. The coalition on the other. Ben, Cody, Sera, and Decker in the middle, doing what each of them was built to do. And on the Caldrath side, Lord Edwyn Cassin — the man who designed the labor system, who has blood on very clean hands — holding the order to fire.