Chapter 22
The storm had passed.
Verity woke to silence so complete it took her a moment to identify what was missing. The wind had stopped. The howling that had filled the cave for hours had given way to a stillness that pressed against her ears like cotton.
She was still lying against Targesh's chest, both of them wrapped in blankets and the residual heat of the fire's embers. Gray light filtered in from the cave mouth. Dawn, or close to it.
They dressed in silence. Her layers had dried near the fire overnight, stiff but serviceable. Her muscles protested every movement, but she forced herself through the motions. The pass was close. She had not come this far to be stopped by sore thighs.
Outside, the world had been remade in white.
Snow covered everything—the trail, the rocks, the stunted trees that clung to the mountainside.
The sky was pale blue, and the sun was just cresting the eastern peaks, throwing long shadows across the drifts.
The horses stood in their lean-to shelter, breath steaming, watching the humans emerge with expressions of profound disapproval.
Targesh checked their legs, their hooves, their tack. He murmured something to his mount in Orcish, and the animal's ears flicked forward.
"Two hours," he said. "Perhaps less. The snow will slow us, but the trail is clear beneath it."
Verity mounted without assistance this time, though her body screamed at the effort. The horse shifted beneath her, adjusting to her weight, then stood steady.
They rode.
The trail above the cave climbed steeply.
In places, the snow had drifted deep enough to reach the horses' bellies; in others, the wind had stripped it away entirely, leaving bare stone slick with ice.
Targesh picked the route carefully, and Verity followed.
She had stopped trying to guide her horse.
The animal knew this path better than she ever would, and her interference only slowed them both.
She gave it its head and focused on staying in the saddle.
The sun climbed. The shadows shortened. The cold remained, but the wind stayed quiet, and without its teeth, the temperature was merely uncomfortable rather than dangerous.
"There." Targesh's voice cut through her concentration.
She looked up.
The trail had opened onto a broad ledge, a natural plateau carved into the mountainside.
Beyond the ledge, the land fell away in a series of cliffs and scree slopes and narrow ravines that twisted down toward the valley far below.
But the plateau itself was wide and relatively flat, perhaps two hundred yards across, scattered with boulders and low rock formations.
Thornfield Pass.
Verity's horse stopped without her asking it to. She sat in the saddle, staring at the place her brother had died, and felt nothing at all.
She had expected—what? A battlefield frozen in time? Bones scattered across the snow? Some visible scar on the land that marked where violence had occurred?
The pass was empty. Silent. Snow-covered and still. If men had died here four years ago, the mountain had swallowed every trace of them.
Targesh dismounted. She felt him approach, felt his hand on her knee, but she couldn't look away from the emptiness.
"The battle happened there." He pointed toward the center of the plateau, where a cluster of boulders formed a natural defensive position. "Valdaran forces held the rocks. The clans came from the west, through that ravine. It was over in less than an hour."
She dismounted. Her legs held, barely. She stood in the snow, looking at the boulders, trying to imagine her brother crouched behind them with a sword in his hand and fear in his throat.
She could not make the image form.
"Where are the markers?"
"This way."
He led her across the plateau, the snow crunching under their boots. The horses waited where they had been left, apparently content to rest after the morning's climb.
The markers were near the western edge, where the ravine opened onto the plateau.
They were not the neat cairns of the patrol trail, not stacked stones with carved symbols.
They were boulders, large ones, with their surfaces carved into patterns that meant nothing to her until Targesh stopped beside the first and traced the lines with his finger.
"Names," he said. "Each stone marks where a warrior fell. The carvings tell who they were."
She looked at the boulder. The patterns were Orcish script, angular and dense, covering the rock's surface from base to crown. At the top, carved larger than the rest, a single word—a name, she assumed.
"Torunn," Targesh said. "Brenneth's brother. He fell here, defending the ravine so that others could retreat."
She stood at the stone, looking at the name she couldn't read, and felt her chest tighten. "How many?"
"Seventeen orc dead. The stones—" He looked across the plateau. "There are more. Scattered where they fell."
"And the humans?"
She knew the answer before he spoke. She had known it since Brenneth told her in the tannery.
"The Valdaran dead were retrieved by their own forces. What they could carry, they took. The rest—" He paused. "The rest were buried where they lay."
"There are no markers."
"No."
She walked the plateau.
Not systematically, not with the careful grid pattern she would have used in an archive. She walked because she could not stand still, because moving was the only thing keeping her upright, because if she stopped she would have to feel what was rising in her chest and she was not ready.
The pass spread around her, empty and vast. The wind had picked up slightly, a cold breath that carried the scent of snow and pine and distance. The sun was fully risen now, but it gave no warmth. Just light, harsh and clear, illuminating every detail of the landscape.
No names. No markers. The human dead had been buried without ceremony, their bodies committed to the mountain with nothing to say who they were or why they had been here. If Corvin's body was somewhere beneath this snow, there was nothing to distinguish his grave from any other patch of ground.
She had come looking for something to hold. A date carved in stone. A name she could trace with her fingers. A place to stand and say here, this is where he is.
The mountain had given her silence.
She stopped walking. She had reached the center of the plateau, near the cluster of boulders where the Valdaran forces had made their stand.
The rocks were massive, taller than her, arranged by ancient chance into a formation that had probably seemed defensible to the soldiers who had crouched behind them.
It had not been enough.
She pressed her palm against the cold stone. Beneath her glove, the rock was rough and unyielding, nothing like the smooth paper of archives, nothing like the documents she had spent her life touching and preserving and cataloguing. This was a different kind of record. One that kept no names.
"Corvin." Her voice came out cracked and barely audible. "I'm here."
The wind answered. Nothing else.
She said his name again, louder this time.
Then again, shouting it into the empty air, her voice bouncing off the rocks and fading into nothing.
She shouted until her throat was raw, until the name stopped sounding like a name and became just a meaningless sound, absorbed by the mountain that did not care who she was or why she had come.
Then she stopped shouting, and the silence rushed back in, and she understood.
There was nothing to find.
Corvin was gone.
She could stand here for a hundred years and she would never find a document that told her where he lay.
She could dig through every foot of snow and she would never find the specific handful of bones that had once been her brother.
This was it. This was all she would ever have: a cold plateau, a field of orc markers, and the absolute absence of the answer she had traveled a thousand miles to find.
She sat down in the snow.