On the edge of empire, survival is a game of strategy—and the price of freedom is often paid in secrets.

In 1755, as Colonial America trembles under British ambition, the Crown’s brutal expulsion of the Acadians shatters countless lives. For Clément Gosselin, the forests of Nova Scotia become both refuge and battleground. There—amid Mi’kmaq allies who master the land and the silent language of spycraft—he learns that every footstep is a move on a hidden board.

But the conflict widens. Whispers of Revolutionary War resistance echo across the Atlantic, and Clément is drawn into the era’s first currents of intelligence history. Recruited for covert operations and trained in the ruthless arts that will one day define the Culper Spy Ring, he must navigate a labyrinth of shifting loyalties where one wrong gesture can cost a people their future.

At the center of it all looms a man known only as Mr. Smith—an unsettling strategist whose mastery of espionage offers salvation at a staggering price. Freedom, Clément discovers, isn’t wrested from tyranny by muskets alone. Sometimes it’s bartered in dark rooms, brokered with shadows, and secured by secrets too dangerous to speak.

Survival means striking bargains with forces you barely comprehend—and gambling that the next move is yours, not theirs.