Chapter 20
They left before dawn the next day.
The courtyard was empty except for the stable hands who had prepared the horses and Ralvar, who stood by the gate with his arms crossed and his expression unreadable.
Verity wore every layer Delia had given her: wool against skin, leather over wool, the bear-lined cloak heavy on her shoulders.
She felt like a child playing dress-up in clothes meant for someone larger.
The horses were mountain-bred, shaggy and broad-chested, their breath steaming in the cold air. Targesh secured the last of the saddlebags while Verity stood uselessly nearby, her hands buried in the cloak's deep pockets.
"You remember the southern patrol route." Targesh did not look up from the straps he was checking. "If there is trouble—"
"I will handle it." Ralvar's voice was flat. "As I have handled everything else you have left in my care for the past nineteen years."
Targesh straightened. Something passed between the two orcs, unspoken. Then Targesh clasped Ralvar's forearm, and Ralvar returned the grip.
Verity watched silently. The exchange was brief and efficient, the kind of farewell between men who had said goodbye so many times that the words had worn smooth.
Targesh turned to her. "Can you mount?"
She had ridden before. Twice. Both times on placid mares chosen specifically for nervous passengers. This horse was neither placid nor a mare, and it regarded her skeptically.
"I can try."
His hands found her waist. He lifted her into the saddle as though she weighed nothing, settling her against the horse's broad back before she could protest. The animal shifted beneath her, adjusting to her weight, and she grabbed the pommel with both hands.
"Grip with your knees," Targesh said. "Not your hands."
"My hands are the only thing keeping me from falling off."
"Your knees will do that. Loosen your grip."
She loosened her grip. The horse immediately took a step forward, and she clutched the pommel again.
Targesh made a sound that might have been amusement. He swung onto his own mount with the easy grace of someone who had been riding since before she was born, and the horse beneath him responded instantly to the shift of his weight.
"Follow my lead," he said. "The trail is narrow until we clear the first ridge."
He guided his horse toward the gate. The stable hands pulled it open, and the gray light of early morning spilled into the courtyard. Beyond the walls, the mountain waited.
Verity's horse followed without being told.
The first hour was silence and stone.
The trail switchbacked up the mountainside, cut into the rock by generations of orc patrols.
Verity concentrated on staying in the saddle, her thighs burning with the effort of gripping, her hands white-knuckled on the reins.
The horse seemed to know the path better than she did, picking its way over loose scree and around jutting boulders with an indifference to her attempts at guidance.
Targesh rode ahead, his back straight, his shoulders blocking half the sky. He did not look back to check on her. He did not need to. The trail was too narrow for her to fall far, and the horse was too steady to let her tumble.
The sun crested the eastern peaks as they reached the first ridge.
Below them, Northwatch spread out like a map—the courtyard where she had first arrived, the great hall where she had committed her first offense, the archives carved into the mountain beneath her quarters.
From here, it looked small. Manageable. A toy fortress in a world of stone and sky.
Targesh reined his horse to a halt at the ridge's edge. Verity's mount stopped beside him without instruction.
"We follow the ridgeline for another hour," he said. "Then descend into the valley. We will camp tonight at Stonehaven shelter."
She nodded. Her throat was too dry for speech.
He reached into his saddlebag and produced a waterskin, holding it out to her. She took it, drank, handed it back. His fingers brushed hers in the exchange, warm despite the cold.
"You are doing well," he said.
"I am terrified."
"The two are not incompatible."
He turned his horse back toward the trail. She followed.
The valley below the ridge was gentler than the approach. Pine forests replaced bare stone, and the trail widened enough for two horses to ride abreast. Targesh slowed until she drew alongside him, their stirrups nearly touching.
"You have questions," he said.
She always had questions. The problem was choosing which ones to ask.
"How many times have you made this journey?"
"To Thornfield Pass specifically? Three times. To the high passes in general?" He considered. "More than I can count."
They rode in silence for a while. The forest thickened around them, pines giving way to darker evergreens whose branches interlocked overhead. The light dimmed.
"My brother was only twenty-four," Verity said.
Targesh did not respond. He did not need to. She could feel his attention like a weight.
"He was three years younger than me. He used to follow me around when we were children.
Into the library, into the Archives when I started my apprenticeship.
He hated books. Couldn't sit still long enough to read anything longer than a letter.
But he followed me anyway because—" Her voice caught.
She pressed on. "Because that was who he was. He wanted to be wherever I was."
"He joined the military?"
"When he was eighteen. I told him not to. I told him it was dangerous, that the border was unstable, that he would be risking his life for politics he did not understand." She laughed, the sound brittle. "He said I worried too much. He said he would be fine. He said he would write every week."
"Did he?"
"For the first two years. Then monthly. Then—" She swallowed. "His last letter arrived three days before the notice of his death."
The horses walked on. The forest breathed around them, the sound of wind through needles, the distant call of something that might have been a bird.
"I keep thinking about what you said. In your quarters, about the annotations." She forced her voice steady. "You said an unnamed death is still a death. That it should be marked."
"Yes."
"I have been carrying Corvin for four years. But I have been carrying him wrong. Like a wound. Like something to protect. Not like a memory. Not like a name worth marking."
"There is no wrong way to carry the dead." His voice was rough. "There is only the weight, and how long you have held it."
"The weight changes," she said. "That's what I didn't understand.
I thought grief was supposed to get lighter.
Everyone said it would get lighter. Time heals, they said.
The sharpness fades." She shook her head.
"I wake up some mornings and forget for a moment that he's gone, and then I remember, and it's like losing him again. Every time."
Targesh was quiet for a moment as the horses picked their way through a stretch of trail where roots had broken through the packed earth.
"Nineteen years ago," he said, "I became warchief because Gorath Mountainbreaker died in a raid I should have seen coming."
Verity turned to look at him. His face was in profile, the scars catching the dim forest light.
"He was not my father. He was not my kin. But he trained me from the time I could hold a blade." His jaw tightened. "When he fell, I was three ridges away, dealing with a distraction that had been engineered to draw me from his side."
"You couldn't have known."
"No. I could not have known." He said it like a fact he had recited to himself a thousand times. "But knowing that changes nothing. The weight does not care whether you earned it. It settles where it settles."
The trail opened into a small clearing. Sunlight broke through the canopy in scattered shafts, illuminating patches of moss and stone. Targesh reined his horse to a stop.
"We rest here. Water the horses."
The clearing offered little warmth, but the horses drank gratefully from a stream that cut through the moss-covered rocks. Verity dismounted, her legs nearly buckling when they took her weight. Every muscle from hip to ankle screamed in protest.
Targesh watched her stagger but did not offer help. She was grateful for that. She needed to find her footing, literally and otherwise.
They ate dried meat and hard cheese from the saddlebags, standing because sitting would mean getting up again. The food was dense and salty, designed for sustenance rather than pleasure. Verity chewed mechanically and watched the horses crop at the sparse grass.
"How much farther to the shelter?"
"Four hours. Perhaps five, depending on the terrain."
Four hours. She could survive four hours.
The trail climbed again after the clearing, winding through a stretch of forest where the trees grew stunted and sparse.
The wind found gaps in her layers she had not known existed.
Her fingers went numb inside her gloves.
Her nose ran constantly, and she stopped wiping it because removing her hand from the cloak's warmth was not worth the temporary relief.
Targesh rode ahead, apparently unbothered by the temperature. His breath steamed, but he showed no sign of discomfort. She supposed a lifetime in these mountains had burned the cold out of him, or taught him to carry it so deep it no longer registered.
The fourth hour brought snow.
Not a storm. Just a steady fall of fat white flakes that accumulated on her shoulders and the horse's mane and the brim of the hood she had pulled low over her face. The world went soft and muffled. The only sounds were hoofbeats and breathing and the whisper of snow settling on stone.
"There." Targesh pointed.
She squinted through the white. Ahead, where the trail curved around a massive boulder, she could just make out a dark shape against the mountainside. A structure. Walls. A roof.
"Stonehaven," he said.
Targesh led the horses to a lean-to shelter attached to the main building, where a trough and hay rack waited.
The shelter was crude but solid—four walls of stacked stone, a roof of heavy timber, a door that Targesh had to duck to enter. Inside, the darkness was absolute until he struck flint to tinder and coaxed a small fire to life in the central pit.
The light revealed a single room. Packed earth floor. Stone walls blackened by decades of smoke. A raised platform along one wall, covered in furs that looked older than Verity. A stack of firewood in the corner. Nothing else.
Verity stood in the doorway, snow melting on her shoulders, her legs trembling with exhaustion. The fire's warmth reached her in waves, beckoning her forward. She took three steps and stopped, unsure where to put herself.
"Sit." He gestured toward the fur-covered platform. "Remove your boots."
She sat. Her fingers fumbled with the laces, clumsy and uncooperative. After the third failed attempt, Targesh knelt in front of her and took over, his hands steady and sure as he worked the frozen leather loose.
"Your feet are like ice."
"All of me is like ice."
He pulled her boots off, then her socks, and took her feet between his palms. The heat of him was shocking. She gasped and tried to pull away, but he held firm.
"Let me."
He rubbed circulation back into her toes, his thumbs pressing into her arches, his fingers working the stiffness from her ankles.
The sensation was painful at first, then merely uncomfortable, then something approaching warmth.
She watched his bent head, the firelight catching the curve of his tusks, the concentration in his expression.
"How much farther?" she asked.
"We will reach the pass by afternoon tomorrow. The descent takes another two hours." He stoked the fire, sending sparks spiraling toward the smoke-blackened ceiling. "We can spend the night at the pass or return to this shelter. Your choice."
"What would you recommend?"
"The pass is colder. Exposed. But if you want time there, staying the night may be wise."
She thought about it. Standing on the ground where her brother died. Speaking to the wind that carried his name. Sleeping beside his bones.
"I want to stay," she said. "At least one night."
He nodded. The firelight caught the planes of his face, the scars that mapped his history, the depth of his eyes.
"Then we stay."