The King of the Nine Houses is dying on a toilet, and his final command is a suicide mission.

Garrick Hale is done with war. A retired sergeant with a shattered knee and a desire for nothing more than a quiet farm, he wants to be left alone. But when a dying courier bleeds out in a stable, Garrick is left holding a sealed scroll that could stop a civil war?or start one.

Lady Seraphina Thorne is a spy who knows too much. Disgraced, hunted by her own father, and running on borrowed time, she needs a way out of the political shark tank she's fallen into. She finds it in the shape of a massive, reluctant soldier holding a piece of the King's authority.

Together, they have to cross three hundred miles of the King's Cobble?a legendary highway now choked by a blockade, bandits, and the private armies of merchant princes who are engineering a famine for profit.

In this world, magic isn't free. To move the earth, Garrick has to burn his own body's fuel until he starves. To hear the truth in the air, Sera has to pay in blood. They are broken, exhausted, and outgunned, carrying the weight of a kingdom that has already forgotten them.

This isn't a story about saving the world. It's a story about surviving the road, paying the debt, and trying to keep your boots clean in a filthy war.