Tyler shrank back against the splintered wood of his father’s desk, his boots scraping through fallen papers.
He could not look at Camilla.
Camilla lunged for the open ledger.
Elena caught the binding before her nails reached the leaves.
She pulled it against her body and turned sideways, setting her heel against a floorboard seam.
Asteria’s heat rushed into her hands.
The page naming her mother was still open beneath her thumb.
“Give me that record.”
“Touch it and you lose the fingers.”
Camilla struck toward Elena’s neck.
Elena drove the book’s binding into her wrist, knocking the claws aside.
Camilla cried out and cradled the bruised arm.
“You heard him.” She glared past Elena at Tyler.
“He would trade me away like an old plow horse to keep his roof up. Tomorrow he will crawl to you if it stops the rot in his chest.”
“Camilla, stop.” Tyler’s hands shook against his knees.
“A broken boy. That is what you came back for.”
Boots rang on the spiral stair.
Vane called an order below, and Silvercrest warriors answered with snarls.
Kenneth’s voice rose through the stairwell, followed by Orin’s.
The northern observers were coming up amid the armed valley men.
Elena shifted the ledger beneath her arm; if they crowded into this room, she would have nowhere to put it beyond their reach.
“The southern line is buckling,” Elena said, stepping toward the open corridor.
Camilla blocked the passage with her body.
“You leave nothing behind except your carcass.”
Elena drove her shoulder into Camilla’s chest.
The woman struck the doorframe and stumbled onto the landing as Kenneth reached the top step with four Silvercrest enforcers behind him.
Orin’s voice carried from the turn below.
“Stand down, Kenneth,” Tyler croaked.
He came along the wall with one hand dragging over the stone.
Kenneth looked at him, then at the ledger.
His fingers tightened on the stair rail.
“The ridge is falling, Alpha. The fourth stone is still open. The orchard monolith snapped five minutes ago. Frost is back at the lower roots.”
“The old watchtower first,” Elena said.
“Then the crest.”
She secured the ledger in her pouch.
Below, Vane gathered eighteen outriders, leaving the two at the washroom with Mira’s family.
Kenneth and Orin followed them to the old tower beneath the fourth stone.
Harlan had said beneath the floor, not which part.
Elena lifted the loose boards by the door first: empty joist gaps and rat droppings.
Vane held a torch low.
At the far wall, a warped board’s nail heads lay brighter than the rust around them.
Elena pried it up.
A linen parcel was wedged on a shelf between two joists.
She unwrapped a flat metal seal and a small, tightly bound chest, then touched the chest’s fastening.
She remembered Harlan’s fingers binding her hand and wanted to open what he had been killed before he could finish describing.
Another crack sounded outside.
“Bring it unopened.” Vane ordered a rider to lift it and lash it across his saddle.
More than two hundred pack wolves waited outside.
No one spoke as Elena passed between them with the seal closed in her hand.
Elena climbed toward the southern ridge.
Night lay over the pines; frost caught the riders’ torchlight along their needles.
Mud held her boots at each step, and a tremor passed through the ground before she reached the crest.
The fourth wardstone stood above the old tower, its collar still locked.
Farther along the crest rose the separate eight-foot central anchor, cut with radiating grooves.
The first orchard stone, with her mother’s handprint, stood downhill beneath the ravine; she could not repair it from here.
Twenty paces away, Tyler sank into the dirt.
Each attempt to approach the line brought a fit of breathless coughing.
“Restore them,” Camilla shouted from behind the warriors.
“You wanted to save them. Fix the wards, or we cut down your escort.” Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
“You hold no authority here.” Vane’s hand rested on her sword.
Elena lifted her bandaged hand, and Vane stopped.
“The outer perimeter will stand.”
She fitted the seal into the fourth stone’s recessed lock.
It caught beneath her thumb.
A turn opened the narrow collar under the crest; only then did she cut her left palm.
Fresh red blood acquired a silver sheen as Asteria answered.
Elena pressed it into the exposed groove.
The pillar shivered.
Light scoured the rot from its cuts, and the stone settled upright.
Elena took back the seal and led the escort down to the orchard pillar beneath the ravine.
The crack had reopened across her mother’s handprint.
The tether pulled as she laid her palm against it.
She held contact until it locked into its bed with a crack that travelled across the valley.
The assembled warriors exhaled in unison.
Elena climbed back to the crest with the seal in her hand.
Around the central anchor’s rim she followed the cut words: Warden blood admitted the working; another sovereign’s living blood could feed the boundary through joined wounds, guided into the cradle by the Warden.
The donor paid while the wards stood upon that gift.
A separate warning named the burn awaiting an unadmitted hand inside the defensive cuts.
She tucked the seal away without opening that lock.
Her bleeding hand stayed at her side.
She wiped the blade on her trousers and sheathed it.
Kenneth pushed through the warriors.
“All four outer stones are holding. Thirty days. But leave the center open, and they drain again.”
“I heard you.”
Tyler rose unsteadily from the mud.
“Elena. Please. Close it.”
“The valley will not freeze tonight. You have thirty days to feed your people.” She folded the clean edge of her sleeve around the cut.
“You do not get my blood shut into your father’s hearth.”
Nobody spoke.
A warrior behind Tyler shifted his spear from one hand to the other.
The older trackers lowered their eyes.
Elena remembered those same faces outside the kitchen after her mother’s burial, turning away from an eight-year-old who had questions.
She hated the way they looked down now, as though it could spare her from recognizing them.
She wanted one of them to look at the hand he was asking her to cut.
“Every thirty days, you will have to ask me,” she told Tyler.
“Remember that when you look at the people still alive below us. Your father tried to wipe out my line. I have left yours a valley.”
Tyler stared down at his boots, unable to answer.
Camilla shoved past the elders, her voice shrill with rage.
“Slaughter her now. She has made us slaves. Tyler, order the wolves to strike.”
Tyler did not raise his head.
“No.”
“Tyler!” Camilla screamed.
“I said no,” Tyler shouted, the effort tearing at his ruined throat.
“She leaves under the truce. We gave our word.”
Camilla looked from Tyler to the warriors behind him.
No spear rose at her demand.
She dragged her bruised wrist beneath her cloak and backed toward the path.
“Then rot with your dying pack,” Camilla said.
She spun toward the horse lines.
Two guards intercepted her; she opened one’s cheek with her claws while her two red-sashed enforcers drove a spare mare between him and his partner.
Four northern outriders broke after them.
Camilla gained the southern timber track only as her men cut a waiting rope across the path.
A stacked haul of pine logs slid into the pursuers’ horses.
One rider went down; the other three pulled him out while arrows came from the far bend.
He remained on his knees.
Vane sent two riders to bring the fallen man back.
“Her rear guard has the timber bend. We keep the road to the kennels and our wounded. I will not feed that ambush one horse at a time.”
“The kennels first,” Elena said.
“And the treaty before I leave.”
The four pursuers returned to the gatehouse, one supported between two saddles with his leg strapped against a broken spear haft.
Tyler signed beneath the northern terms at the gatehouse table.
Elena kept her bleeding hand wrapped while he signed both leaves of the dispatch: half the winter stores, the western timber rights, and the tribute written in the treaty.
“First wagons at noon,” she said.
He entered the date, signed, and handed one dispatch to his storekeeper.
The man opened the granary doors while Elena put the treaty and the other leaf beside the ledger.
By the washroom hearth, the two northern riders still stood beside Mira’s family.
A stable hand had brought the padded cart.
Elena knelt by the pallet; Mira’s mother was alive, breathing in shallow catches, her younger daughter tucked against her.
Eight-year-old Toby crawled out from behind a feed bin when Elena called him.
She wrapped the sick woman in a blanket, and the riders helped her into the waiting cart.
Martha brought bread to the padded cart.
“She can’t take the high track like this,” the nearest rider said, looking at the mother’s shallow breathing.
“Ford treatment tents first. The hostler will send north for a litter team.” Elena looked from the rough wheel to the woman’s face.
“Both of you stay with them. Martha goes too.” She lifted the younger girl aboard beside her mother, then held out a hand for Toby.
“Stay with Martha.” He climbed up without releasing her fingers until the cart moved.
Elena watched the two northern riders take either side of it.
North was still the destination; the Ford was the first place where the sick woman could lie under a healer’s hands.
She still felt the pressure of Toby’s fingers where he had held her hand.
She wanted his next sleep to last until morning.
Elena mounted.
The ledger and signed terms rested against her knee; the seal remained in her pouch.
The chest-bearing rider joined the escort, with Kenneth and Orin among the rear horses.
No spear rose as they crossed the border stream.
They rode through the remaining night.
At daybreak the northern crags appeared above the trees, and both bindings were stiff against Elena’s hands.
“You broke their pride and left their roofs standing,” Vane said beside her.
“That took restraint.”
“A burned roof pays no debt. Now they have to ask me again in thirty days.”
“They will despise you for it.”
Elena flexed her fingers against the reins and stopped when the cuts pulled.
“They managed that when I scrubbed their floors.”
Ahead, where the military road met the stone bridge crossing into Obsidian land, a lone horseman thundered toward them from the north.
Vane threw up her arm, halting the squad.
“Citadel courier.”
The courier hauled his lathered horse to a stop.
Blood had soaked his tunic, and more ran from a gash along his cheek.
He swayed before he could speak.
“Commander Vane. Turn your mounts.”
Vane rode close enough to catch him if he fell.
“What happened?”
“The Crimson Fang hit the southern watchtower at dawn. Three hundred mercenaries under Camilla’s family crest.” He pressed a hand to his bleeding side.
“The garrison was butchered.”
Elena pictured Camilla reaching her mare on the ridge.
Three hundred spears could hardly have gathered in the hours since that flight.
If the courier’s account was right, the attack had already been waiting.
“Where is the King?” She brought her horse alongside his.
“Cassian has shut the citadel gates against you. The High Council is sitting.”
“Under what pretext?” Vane asked.
“High treason.” The courier looked at the pouch against Elena’s knee.
“He says your mission drew the vanguard away. He says you sold the southern garrison to buy that dead woman’s book.”