For eighty years, the dwarven holds have been sealed from the outside world. The official story: after the Gray Pass Massacre, the holds closed themselves off out of fear and hatred. No human has set foot inside Emberhold in living memory.

Maren Ashworth, a mineral assessor from Ashmark, is granted unprecedented access to renegotiate trade terms. She expects suspicious dwarves and hostile negotiations. Instead, she finds a conspiracy — one that stretches back to the massacre itself.

The isolation was engineered. A secret pact between senior Ember-Born trade masters and the Ashmark Merchant Conclave has kept both cultures in profitable ignorance for generations. The Ember-Born underprice their goods and pocket the difference. The Conclave collects inflated fees. Both sides sell the story of mutual danger to justify the walls.

Maren's only allies are a disgraced Ember-Born cartographer who tried to expose the truth five years ago and paid for it with her freedom, and a Fire-Wright engineer who's been hiding on the human side of the pass, presumed dead, waiting for a chance to clear his name.