Chapter 23
Targesh found her there.
She didn't know how long she'd been sitting.
The cold had seeped through her trousers, numbing her legs, but she couldn't make herself stand.
The boulders rose around her like a cage, and the sky pressed down from above, and she was so tired.
Tired of carrying this grief, tired of searching, tired of hoping for something that was never going to come.
He did not speak. He sat down beside her in the snow, close enough that she could feel his warmth, far enough that she did not feel crowded. His presence was solid, patient, immovable.
"I thought I would feel different," she said eventually. Her voice was hoarse from shouting. "Coming here. Seeing it. I thought... I don't know what I thought. That there would be some kind of..."
She trailed off.
"Closure," Targesh said.
She scoffed. "Yes. Closure. That ridiculous word people use when they want grief to end neatly." She pressed her palms against her eyes.
Targesh was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough.
"Three years into my time as warchief, there was a skirmish at Harrow's Gap.
Fourteen warriors went out. Nine came back.
The five we lost—" He paused, his jaw tightening.
"We found two of the bodies. The other three were taken by the Valdaran forces.
" He said the word taken like it tasted foul.
"Displayed, we were told. As proof of victory. "
Verity lowered her hands from her eyes.
"I sent emissaries. I negotiated. I offered prisoners in exchange.
But Valdara wanted the propaganda more than they wanted their men back.
" His hand found hers, squeezing once before releasing.
"I never found them. I have markers for them at Northwatch, carved with their names, placed in the memorial hall.
But I do not know where their bones are. "
"How did you—" Her voice cracked. "How do you bear it?"
"Badly, at first." He looked out across the plateau, his eyes distant.
"I convinced myself that finding the bodies would fix something.
I spent a year chasing leads, questioning prisoners, sending scouts into territory I had no business risking men for.
" His mouth twisted. "I did not find them.
I found other things instead. More dead. More names for the list."
"What changed?"
"I stopped looking." He turned to face her. "Not because I wanted to. Because I had nothing left to look for. I had exhausted every possibility, and there was nothing. Just absence where there should have been an answer."
"And that was enough? To stop?"
"No." He shook his head slowly. "It was not enough. It will never be enough. But I learned, eventually, that enough is not what grief requires. Grief does not ask to be satisfied. It asks to be carried."
She stared at him. The wind gusted across the plateau, lifting snow into spirals that danced briefly and then fell.
"I have been carrying Corvin for four years," she said. "I am so tired."
"I know."
"I thought if I could just find—something. Some record, some marker, some place where I could stand and say this is where he is—I thought that would make it easier. That the weight would finally lift."
"It does not lift." His voice was gentle in a way she had not heard before. "You simply grow strong enough to bear it."
She considered this. Considered the man beside her, who had been carrying the dead for nineteen years, who had carved his grief into the margins of histories rather than let the names be lost, who had walked her through a storm to bring her to this place.
"You did not have to come," she said. "You could have told me no. You could have said it was too foolish."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because you needed to come." He said it simply, as though it were obvious. "And because I would not let you come alone."
She leaned into him. His arm came around her, pulling her against his side, and she let herself be held.
The cold pressed in from all sides, but where she touched him, there was warmth.
There was solidity. There was a man who had stood in her corner without being asked, who had seen her grief and carried her toward it instead of away.
They stayed on the plateau as the afternoon waned.
Verity walked it again, slower this time, letting herself see it for what it was rather than what she had wanted it to be.
The orc markers rose from the snow like monuments, each one carved with a name and a story she could not read.
She stopped at each one, touched the stone, tried to imagine the life that had ended there.
Targesh walked with her. He translated when she asked, giving her the names of warriors she had never known and would never meet: Torunn, brother of Brenneth.
Vashka, who had been three weeks from her bonding ceremony.
Morrel, who had killed four humans before a spear took him in the back.
Grenn, who had been sixteen years old and on his first patrol.
The names blurred together after a while, but she held onto them anyway.
When they had visited every marker, she returned to the center of the plateau. The boulders cast long shadows in the afternoon light, dark shapes that pooled like water across the snow.
"I want to leave something," she said.
Targesh watched her. He did not ask what or why. He simply waited.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out her brother's letter.
It was folded small, creased from four years of carrying, the paper soft from the oil of her fingers.
She had memorized every word years ago. She did not need the physical object anymore.
She had been clinging to it as though the paper itself contained something she could not access any other way.
She unfolded it. Read it one more time, her eyes moving over the familiar loops of Corvin's handwriting.
Verity —
We made good time through the lower pass. The weather's held, which Sergeant Maren says means it will be terrible by the end of the week.
The mountains here are beautiful. You would love them. You would have questions about everything. The rocks, the snow, the plants that grow where nothing should grow. I keep thinking I should take notes for you, but you know me. I can never sit still long enough.
The twenty-third of Harvestmoon. Thornfield Pass. I'll write again when we're through.
— Corvin
She folded it again. Knelt in the snow beside the nearest boulder, one without markings, just a rock that happened to be where her brother might have stood.
She did not bury the letter. The ground was frozen too hard for that. Instead, she wedged it into a crack in the stone, pressing it deep, anchoring it against the wind.
"I don't know if you're here," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "I don't know if your bones are under this snow or if Valdara took them back and I'll never know what they did with them. But I'm here. I came. I wanted you to know that someone remembered."
The wind blew. The paper fluttered but held.
"I'm not going to keep looking," she said. "You've been gone for four years, and I've been holding onto you so tightly because letting go felt like losing you again."
She pressed her palm against the cold stone.
"But that's not how it works, is it? Holding on doesn't bring you back.
It just keeps me from moving forward." Her voice cracked.
"I have to move forward now. I have to learn to carry you differently.
Not like a wound. Like a memory. Like something I can take with me instead of something that anchors me to the past."
The tears came then, the kind that shook her whole body and left her gasping for air. She knelt in the snow beside a rock that meant nothing and wept for her brother, for the years of not knowing, for the closure she would never have.
Targesh's arms came around her from behind.
He did not try to stop the weeping. He did not offer words of comfort or platitudes about time or healing.
He simply held her while she fell apart, his body a wall between her and the wind, his presence the only solid thing in a world that had dissolved into grief.
She wept until she was empty. Until the tears stopped, and all that remained was a hollow quiet that might have been peace or might have been just numbness.
Targesh lifted her. She did not protest; her legs would not have held her anyway. He carried her across the snow to where the horses waited, and settled her onto a flat rock near a shallow overhang that provided shelter from the wind.
"Rest," he said. "I will make camp."
She watched him move through the fading light, gathering wood from dead trees beyond the plateau's edge, building a fire. The flames caught quickly, throwing orange light across the snow, and she held her hands toward the warmth without really feeling it.
The sun set. The sky turned colors, orange and pink and purple bleeding into the deep blue of approaching night. The stars emerged one by one, sharp and clear in the mountain air, more stars than she had ever seen from Caelvorn.
Targesh sat beside her. They did not speak. There was nothing left to say, and the silence was not empty. It was full, weighted with everything they had shared over the past two days.
Eventually, she leaned against him. His arm came around her, pulling her close, and she felt the steady rhythm of his breathing, the heat of his body cutting through the cold.
"Thank you," she said.
He did not answer. He did not need to.
They slept on the plateau that night, wrapped in blankets near the fire, her smaller form fitted against the curve of his larger one. The stars wheeled overhead. She watched them until her eyes grew heavy, naming the constellations she knew and making up names for the ones she didn't.
She dreamed of her brother.
Not the last time she had seen him, thin and eager in his new uniform.
Not the letter she had left wedged in the stone.
She dreamed of something earlier, the two of them in their father's library when she was seventeen and he was fourteen, surrounded by books he didn't care about but refused to leave.
Why do you read so much? he had asked, fidgeting on the windowsill. You can't even remember everything.
I don't have to remember everything, she had said. I just have to remember where to find it.
In the dream, he laughed. That's cheating.
It's efficiency.
Same thing. He had jumped down from the windowsill, restless as always. Come outside. There's a world out there, Verity. You can't learn everything from books.
She had not gone. She had stayed with her books, and he had gone without her, and a decade later he had gone somewhere she could not follow no matter how far she traveled.
But in the dream, she stood up. She closed the book. She followed him out into the sunlight, and he turned back to grin at her, and for one perfect moment they were just two people with infinite time ahead of them.
There you go, he said. That wasn't so hard.
She woke to gray dawn and Targesh already stirring beside her. The fire had burned to embers. The stars were gone, faded into a sky that promised clear weather for the descent.
She lay still for a moment, holding onto the dream.
Then she rose, and they prepared to leave, and she did not look back at the boulder where she had left her brother's letter. She did not need to. She knew where it was. She knew where everything was, now.
The mountain would keep it. The mountain kept everything.