Page 9

The first two wolves take the bait and die for it, Nightfall opening one from shoulder to spine before the second’s paws have finished skidding on the narrowed ledge. Blood hits the snow black in the thin light, steaming where it lands. I’ve got my daggers out, moonsteel catching the same pale gleam, and I put one blade into a throat that shouldn’t be able to twist like that to avoid me — too fast, too aware, nothing natural about how it recalculates and comes at me again from a different angle while the first wound is still registering. My arm’s shaking by the third strike. I don’t let it show.

That’s when the fifth wolf comes from my blind side.

I hear it before I see it — wrong-silent, wrong-fast, already airborne by the time I turn — and there isn’t a version of this where I get my blade up in time. There isn’t a version where I save myself.

I don’t try to.

I throw myself toward Vorren instead of away from the wolf, some instinct older than thought overriding seven years of never trusting anyone else with my own survival. That decision terrifies me worse than the wolf does — choosing someone else’s hands over my own reflexes, betting my life on a man I’ve known four days instead of the knives I’ve trusted for a decade.

He catches me out of the air.

One arm locks around my waist, spinning me clear in the same motion his blade finds the wolf’s throat mid-leap. No wasted motion. No hesitation. Something feral moves through him doing it — a sound low in his chest that isn’t quite a word, teeth bared on the follow-through like the kill isn’t finished just because the wolf’s stopped moving. The wolf drops. The path goes quiet except for our breathing, hard enough to fog the freezing air between our faces.

He doesn’t let go.

His hand is flat against the small of my back, holding me against him with a grip that hasn’t eased even though the danger’s gone, still and silent at our feet. My fingers have found the front of his armor without my permission, curled into blackened steel like I’m the one keeping us both upright. I can feel every place his body meets mine — chest, hip, the solid wall of him at my back where his other arm hasn’t dropped away either — and none of it reads like relief anymore. It reads like a different ache, low and wanting and inconvenient as hell, sharp enough that saying it out loud right now would end us both.

Neither of us steps back first.

His amber eyes do that thing again—tracking me like they did in the fortress doorway, like there’s a message written on my face that isn’t written anywhere else. My breath is loud enough I’d swear he can hear it through his own armor. I can smell blood and cold iron and, underneath it, him — woodsmoke and old leather, and a warmth that’s got no business surviving a fight this cold.

Something in his voice has gone unsteady at the edges in a way I haven’t heard from him yet. “You should have run.”

“I did run.” My voice doesn’t come out steady either. “Toward you.”

Whatever he expected me to say, it wasn’t that. His jaw goes tight before he can stop it — not shock exactly, more a wall taking a hit it didn’t see coming. His hand tightens hard enough at my back that I feel it in my teeth, and whatever comes out of him next arrives in a register I haven’t heard from him before.

“Don’t do that again.” Barely even words — more growl than sentence, his jaw tight enough to crack. “Don’t you ever put yourself in a blind spot to save me the trouble of protecting you. I’ll take the trouble every time.”

The wind shifts. The mist that’s been clinging to the lower slopes all morning finally tears apart, and nobody looks toward it, because whatever’s happening between our bodies right now feels more urgent than any view this mountain has to offer.

Then I see it over his shoulder, and every other thought in my head goes silent at once.

Through the parting mist, half a mile below and impossibly whole, black spires rise against the mountain like they were carved yesterday instead of a thousand years ago — towers catching the morning light, walls without a single visible scar of the fire every history book in six kingdoms swears destroyed them. No rubble at the base. No blackened stone, no fallen bridges, nothing that speaks of siege or fire or the thousand years everyone agreed had passed since anyone last drew breath inside those walls.

Blackspire. Untouched. Waiting, as if it’s been waiting the entire time everyone told us there was nothing left to find.

Vorren turns, finally, following the direction of my stare, and his arm doesn’t leave my waist even as the rest of him goes rigid with the same disbelief currently running straight through me. His breath goes out of him slow and rough, as a held knot behind his ribs has finally worked itself free.

“It shouldn’t be possible.” Barely a whisper, and rougher for it.

“No.” I don’t step out from under his arm, and he doesn’t suggest I should. “It isn’t.”

FIVE

VORREN

Sixty feet of black stone should not still be standing.

I’ve spent my whole career telling myself the ruins my family guards are exactly that — ruins, a mountain’s worth of dead history nobody’s supposed to disturb. Standing at the base of the Black Gates with Lyessa a step behind me, I can’t make that story hold anymore. Ivy climbs the stone in thick, deliberate ropes, moonflowers threaded through it white and closed against the daylight. No scorch marks. No breach. No siege wall ever crumbled this gracefully. Something built to survive a war got left standing through a thousand years of nobody fighting one.

“Runes.” Lyessa’s already moving along the base, fingers trailing just short of touching, the way she handles anything she isn’t sure won’t bite her back. “Dormant. See the channels cut into the stone — they’re meant to carry light, not just sit there decorative. Someone shut this door and expected somebody to open it again.”

“Nobody’s opened it in a thousand years.”

“Nobody who wasn’t supposed to.”

I press my palm flat against the stone, the way every Warden captain before me has been taught to since the first Blackfang stood this post — an old phrase, older than the language it’s spoken in now, meant to announce a Warden’s authority to whatever ancient ward still listens. I say it. Nothing answers. The stone stays exactly as dead as it’s been my whole life, cold enough to ache through my glove, and for one absurd second I feel like a man knocking on a door that’s forgotten how to hear.