The Clans have fallen. The door between worlds is open.

In a single, ruthless move, the man known as the Hero has seized four of the Ten Clans and given his new nation a name. For Calum O’Brian, the cost is everything: his home in ruins, his father murdered, his best friend taken.

His only hope lies beyond the Great Wall, in the Burly Wood — the forest nobody has crossed on purpose in three hundred years. Guided by the last whispers of a broken flower box and a great owl that shouldn’t exist, Calum leads a small band of survivors into it: a girl who can see in the dark, a Games official with a secret, a mentor whose every insult involves an animal’s anatomy — and a botanist from 1924 who has no idea what world he’s standing in.

Somewhere ahead are the Tuatha, who sent the box. Somewhere behind is the Hero, digging for a weapon that has never lost a battle. And in the forest itself, two powers are pulling at Calum — one to save him, one to end him.