Leoric. His shoulder taking the impact, arm across me, body placed between me and the collapse. The debris catches him across the back. I hear the sound it makes and feel him absorb it through the arm braced against the wall beside my head. Then it's over. Dust and cold air and the storm screaming through the new gap.
I push out from under his arm. He straightens slowly—too slowly, with the careful movement of someone adding new damage to an existing inventory—and looks at the fallen section without expression.
"Are you?—"
"Fine." He steps away and begins directing the escort toward the gap without looking at me again. I stay against the south wall with stone dust on my shoulders and watch him work. He didn't plan that. There was no calculation in it—no political value in shielding a human prisoner from falling debris, no advantage in taking it because his body already carries more damage than it should. He just moved.
I am desperate to bury it neatly with the soldiers he turned away in the street and the refugees he fed without a name and the children he wrote false records for, and let it mean something I already know how to hold.
But the certainty I've been standing on since Blackwater—since before Blackwater, since the streets I grew up on and everything I built on top of them—has a hole in it now that I can't locate well enough to seal. I can't tell what frightens me more:that I might have been wrong about him, or that I'm only now beginning to care. Hating him had been easier when he stayed the monster I needed him to be.
8
LEORIC
We leave the watchtower before the storm has spent itself. Dawn comes thin and gray, dragging light across broken stone and fresh snow. No one speaks much while we clear the ruined floor and check the horses. The collapse has changed the tower behind us. One corner gone. One wall cracked lower than it had been the night before. The sort of damage a person looks at once and then keeps walking from, because standing still only teaches you how close it came.
Corrine does not look at me. That is not true. She looks when she thinks I am occupied. At my shoulder. At the place the beam caught my back. At the hand I keep flexing because the cold has found every old injury and introduced it to the new one. Each glance is quick. Controlled. Irritated, as if concern is a debt she resents discovering in her own pocket.
I prefer her anger. It can be answered. Whatever passed between us in the tower has followed us out here into the snow. Theren notices. Of course he does. He says nothing, which is worse than any warning he could have given me.
By midmorning, the sky clears enough to show the route ahead. Narrow stone throat. High ridges. Too many places forarchers or casters to hide. I know the risk before we reach it, but the safer road east through Vareth would cost us three days, and those days are time for whoever sent assassins into my estate to close every road around us. Corrine sees the problem too.
"Bad route," she says.
"Yes."
"And we're taking it anyway."
"Yes."
Her mouth tightens, but she does not argue. That bothers me more than it should. Speed has already made the choice for us. I put Theren and two of the escorts at the rear and move us through the narrow channel between ridges at a pace that doesn't allow for comfort.
Corrine has been quiet since the watchtower. The quieter she is, the more I'm aware of what caused it, and the weight of being seen in that way by that specific person is not something I have a clean tool for managing. I move her to the middle of the formation and keep my attention on the ridgeline.
The mercenaries are good. I know it in the first three seconds—not from their positioning, which is competent, but from the silence before it. Amateur ambushes are loud. These ones held their positions through wind and cold long enough that when the first ward-break hits the back of our group it comes without warning, clean, the kind of timing that costs money to train. At least two casters. One near the left ridge, one somewhere I haven't seen yet, and that second unknown position is the thing I keep going back to while I'm moving.
I pull the compression ward from the brace on my forearm and release it upslope in the direction the first strike came from. It hits stone and explodes in a concussive ring—not precision work, just noise and debris and the moment of disruption that lets me close on the nearest fighter before he's reoriented. He'sfast. I'm faster, and I've been doing this since before his kind were hired out of border towns.
Corrine is fighting in my peripheral vision. No wasted movement, economical, using terrain better than most trained soldiers. But she's fighting with what they left her and what's left her isn't enough for this.
The second caster opens from the right ridge. The strike is aimed at Corrine, not at me, and that targeting tells me the ambush has a list. I redirect with a deflected ward that costs my left arm's full extension and sends fire up the scarring on that side. I mark the pain and keep moving.
I catch the fear on her face before I process why it matters that I do. Not fear of the mercenaries. Fear of me. She has seen me angry, and controlled. She's seen enough of the scars to understand what violence left behind. But this is different. This is the thing under the title, the discipline, and every civilized word I have forced over the years. The old battlefield answer. Fast. Brutal. Empty of mercy because mercy slows the hand.
Her face changes when I break the nearest fighter's wrist and drive him into the ridge wall. She does not turn away. That is worse.
She doesn't frighten easily. But the way she's looking at me—at what I've just done, at whatever I'm wearing on my face while I do it—that look is something I would rather not have earned and cannot take back. I put it away and find the second caster.
She's separated before I can prevent it. A crevice in the rock face, a fighter cutting her off from the group, the terrain doing exactly what I knew it might when I chose this route. I track her position by sound, and then it changes and it's wrong. I stop making the tactically correct decision.
Theren will have something to say about this. I know it while I'm already going—abandoning the high position, moving downslope through exposed terrain, making myself visible toevery fighter still standing. The man holding Corrine is careful with her. Containing, not killing. Bounty work. Someone has her name on a collection order, which means money spent on certain intelligence, and that also means this ambush connects to something larger than a patrol's luck. When he realizes I am coming, his grip changes. The blade moves from warning to execution.
I reach them before he decides how to handle her. The ward leaves my hand before I get close—a pressure burst, short range, the kind that doesn't need accuracy when the target is standing still. It takes him off his feet and into the rock face hard enough that he doesn't get up. Corrine drops with him, chain still in his grip, and I cross the last few meters and get it free. She's breathing. Blood darkens the hair above her ear, but she is breathing.
I'm bleeding from a cut across my left side where a blade found the gap between my coat and the armor plate beneath it. I don't register how deep until Theren's voice comes from somewhere above and the variables have been resolved. My body starts reporting what it was too busy to mention earlier. Deep enough.
We split because staying together gives the mercenaries one trail to follow. Theren takes two men north with enough noise to look like retreat. The remaining soldier takes the southern with the spare packs. Corrine and I go into the cave system on the east face because I am bleeding too badly to outrun pursuit and because the bounty hunter's orders make one thing clear: she cannot be taken. The stone closes around us, and it's quiet in a way that means we're either safe or not yet dead.
