Page 7

VORREN

The trail markers on this pass have kept Blackfang sons from freezing to death in unmarked snow for six generations, and not one of us has ever asked why a rockslide scarred like a six-pointed star means the safe path bends east instead of west. My father taught it to me the way his taught him — walk to the star, never past it, and if the star’s buried under snowfall, dig until you find it before you take another step. Tradition. Discipline. The kind of thing a man doesn’t question because questioning it was never part of the lesson.

Lyessa stops dead at the third marker we pass and doesn’t move for a long moment, boots planted in old snow, eyes narrowed the way they went narrow over that damaged parchment two nights before a building came down where she should have been standing.

“That’s not weathering.” She crouches, gloved fingers tracing a line I’ve walked past a hundred times without seeing as anything but rock doing what rock does over centuries. “Look at the spacing. Six points, even intervals, cut at an angle that catches morning light and nothing else. That’s Covenant work, Captain. Someone carved a wayfinding sigil into this mountain and called it a rockslide so nobody would ask what it was actually marking.”

“It’s a trail marker.”

“It’s a trail marker because whoever set it wanted travelers to read it as one.” She straightens, and there’s a look on her face somewhere between delight and grief, the same look she wore over the silver ink in that shattered archive. “Your family’s been navigating by Covenant script for six generations and calling it inheritance.”

I don’t have an answer for that. I’ve spent thirty-four years reading these mountains the way my father taught me to read them, and it has never once occurred to me to ask who taught him.

My father knelt where she’s kneeling now, the winter I was nine, and curled my fingers into that same scar in the stone until the cold of it went all the way to bone. Walk to the star, he told me. Never past it. He never once said whose star it was, and I never once asked, because a Blackfang son doesn’t question the mountain — he survives it, and passes the surviving on to the next boy who’ll need it.

It occurs to me now, watching a historian half my size stand in the snow and take my whole family history apart with one look, that I don’t resent her for it nearly as much as I should.

We climb through the morning in weather that can’t decide what it wants to be — clear skies giving way to sudden mist, mist burning off into hard, bright cold that makes every breath feel carved out of glass. She doesn’t complain about the pace, doesn’t ask to stop when I know her legs must be screaming from a climb this steep after two days on horseback. She keeps talking instead, whenever the trail widens enough to allow it.

“How many men have actually walked this pass and lived, in your professional estimation?”

“Enough.”

“That’s not a number.”

“It’s the only answer that matters.” I check the ridgeline out of habit, find nothing, go back to the trail. “You want a number, ask the mountain. It keeps better records than I do.”

“Charming.” She picks her way around a boulder without breaking stride, sure-footed in a way that tells me this isn’t her first climb, whatever her city coat suggests otherwise. “Do you talk to your own men this much, or am I a special case?”

“You’re a witness under my protection.”

“That’s not an answer either.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting on an empty stomach.” Which isn’t an answer at all, and we both know it, and she lets me have the silence anyway. Her laugh finds me twenty minutes later, at some joke Korruk made before we left the fortress, and it lands somewhere under my sternum and stays there, uninvited.

By the time the sky turns the color of a bruise, I already know this storm isn’t one either of us could walk through by choice.

I point to a shape barely visible through the thickening cloud — round stone, half-collapsed on one side, old enough that whatever banner once flew from it rotted away before either of our grandfathers were born. “Watchtower. Half a mile. We’ll lose the light before we make it if we don’t move now.”

“Lead the way, Captain.”

We make it inside eleven minutes before the sky opens. Snow first, then sleet, driving sideways hard enough to scour paint off stone, and I bar the door behind us with an old timber crossbeam that’s outlasted a century of neglect better than the roof has. One room. A cracked hearth someone built into the wall generations ago for exactly this reason. No windows worth the name, just narrow slits built for archers instead of comfort.

I get a fire going while she circles the room, running her palm along the walls like she’s reading them too, cataloging every scratch and scorch mark the way she’d catalog anything she didn’t trust to hold still. When she finally sits, it’s close to the fire and not close enough — she’s shivering inside a coat that was built for a city archive, not a mountain storm, and I’m already unclasping my own cloak before I’ve decided to. I don’t ask. I cross the room and drop it around her shoulders like the matter was never open for discussion, because it wasn’t.

“I don’t need it.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m cold. There’s a difference.” But she doesn’t fight me on it, and how she pulls the cloak tighter a second later tells me exactly how much truth was in that protest.

“Thank you.” Grudging, like the word costs her something. “For the record, I could have survived one night cold.”

“I know.”

“Then why⁠—”

“Because you didn’t have to.” I settle across the fire from her, near enough that the heat reaches us both, far enough that I’m not entirely sure why I chose that distance instead of a shorter one. “That’s the whole of it.”