9. Sabine
SABINE
Ismell the smoke first. Pine resin burning wrong, too thick, too oily, one that doesn't come from hearthfires or cookstoves.
I crest the mountain path and stop dead.
The sky above Blackstone Valley is not the sky I left an hour ago.
Columns of black smoke spiral upward from the settlement like fingers reaching for something to choke.
My supply sack hits the ground before I realize I've dropped it.
I run.
The valley is screaming when I reach the lower road.
Not just people—everything. Livestock tearing loose from broken pens, chickens scattering in flaming arcs across the cobblestones, a cart horse dragging half a burning fence post behind it as it bolts through the market square.
Wooden beams crack and collapse in the heat, sending geysers of orange sparks skyward.
I push past fleeing villagers, grabbing a woman by the arm as she stumbles.
"What happened? Where did they come from?"
"The sky—" she gasps. "Winged things. Hunting—"
She tears free and keeps running. I don't stop her.
Gargoyles?
I already know where my feet are taking me before my mind catches up.
Our cottage is on the east side of the settlement, tucked against the hillside where the mountain fog collects in the morning. I have repaired its roof twice with my own hands. I have scraped frost from its windowsills every winter for seven years.
What remains of it is a skeletal frame swallowed in fire.
The roof is already gone. The walls lean inward like a collapsing chest. The smell of burning wool and pine smoke and something sickeningly familiar—our furniture, our stored grain—rolls over me in a wave, and for a moment my legs simply refuse to function.
Leif.
"Sabine."
I spin. Velka materializes from the smoke like she was born in it, crossbow gripped at her side, copper skin painted in soot.
Her cottage is three doors down from mine.
The roof has already caved. We stare at each other across the wreckage of our street, and no words exist for this, so neither of us says any.
Then a child screams from somewhere inside the burning grain warehouse at the corner of the market square.
We move at the same time.
The heat inside is a physical thing—a wall that pushes back against us as we force our way through the door.
Smoke pours from every crack in the ceiling beams. My eyes water immediately, vision blurring to almost nothing.
Velka drops to a crouch and I follow her instinct without question, both of us moving along the floor where the air is thinnest.
"Here." Velka's voice is a rasp. "Two of them."
Two children are wedged behind a collapsed beam, small bodies curled together.
I wrench the beam sideways with everything I have.
The wood is already half-charred and it splinters under the force, carving fresh lines across my palms. I don't feel it.
I get my arms under the smaller child, Velka takes the older one, and we drag them backward through the door into the street.
Outside, I suck clean air in ragged gasps and set the girl on her feet. She is maybe five. She looks at me with huge, terrified eyes and then starts crying for her mother.
"Find the well square," I tell her. "Run. Don't stop running until you reach the well square."
They go. Velka and I straighten together, and it's only then that I hear the screaming change—not panic anymore, but terror with a specific shape to it.
Something is hunting the people in the market square.
There are four of them. Gargoyles I don't recognize—leaner than Tovian, with wings that angle differently, too sharp, like blades rather than shields.
They move through the fleeing crowd with a terrifying leisure, herding people, cornering them against walls.
And there—backed against the cathedral fence—Father Corren, using his carved cedar cane to shield the two people crouched behind him.
One of them is Leif.
"No—"
I am already moving when the air changes.
The pressure drops so suddenly my ears ring with it. A shockwave rolls through the square—not sound exactly, but force, a concussive displacement of air that staggers every living thing in the valley simultaneously. The gargoyle hunters jerk upward, heads snapping skyward.
Tovian comes down like the mountain itself decided to fall.
He doesn't land. He impacts. Stone cracks beneath the weight of him. The cobblestones buckle outward in a fractured ring from the point where his feet connect, and the nearest gargoyle scout doesn't even have time to turn before Tovian is already through him.
I have seen violence before. I have seen men brawl and I have seen livestock slaughtered and I have seen the aftermath of what raiders leave behind. None of it prepared me for this.
He doesn't fight the way men fight, with hesitation, with the animal calculation of self-preservation. There is no hesitation in him. He moves through the invaders the way a storm moves through trees—absolute, unhurried, inevitable.
A wing sweep sends two of them into a stone wall hard enough to crack the mortar.
A grab and a twist that I force myself not to look away from.
The sounds are terrible. The scout I am watching folds in a direction bodies are not designed to fold, and then Tovian drops him and moves to the next one without pausing to breathe.
He is saving them, some rational part of me observes, detached beneath the horror. He is specifically saving them.
Because the scouts are dying in the order they were closest to the people. He is working outward from Leif and Father Corren. He knows exactly what he's doing.
A figure breaks from the chaos before he can reach her— sleek and elegant and pale, wings catching the smoke-thick air with contemptuous grace. A gargoyle female. She wheels above the carnage for one sharp moment and she meets his eyes across the burning square, hers black as polished coal.
“Flora!” He bellows.
The square goes quiet and villagers stand frozen in the ash and the embers. Tovian stands amidst it all, chest heaving, dark blood—his own and theirs—running in rivulets across his obsidian skin. His wings are half-spread, instinctive and territorial.
He looks like every nightmare the valley ever whispered about.
And then she banks hard into the smoke and disappears.
I cross the square before anyone else has remembered how to move. He sees me coming and his posture shifts—still wound tight, still vibrating with the aggression of a fight not fully released from his body—but his wings fold incrementally.
"You're bleeding," I say.
"I am aware."
The lacerations run deep across his side and shoulder, four parallel gouges where a claw caught him. I pull the spare linen strips from inside my coat and press them against the worst of it without waiting to be invited. My hands shake. I notice this distantly and ignore it.
He is very still while I work. Like he doesn't trust himself to move.
"Sabine."
Leif's voice breaks across the square. He is running toward me, face white beneath the ash and tear-tracks, and he pulls up short five feet away because Tovian is standing directly behind me and Leif is seventeen and not entirely stupid.
"You said we were going to leave and you disappeared."
The guilt hits me. I look at my brother and the burning frame of the house our parents left us. I look at the ash coating the stones where families we have known our entire lives just ran for their lives from something we woke up.
"I know," I say quietly. "Leif. I know what I said."
"Then why are we still—"
"Because I can't." The words come out steadier than I feel them. "I can't leave and not know why this happened. I need to stay and fight."
Leif stares at me, unblinking. Then he looks at Tovian. Then back at me again. He doesn't say anything.
Tovian speaks into the quiet. Low and unadorned, the way he delivers every hard truth.
"She will come back. Tharros won't stop sending packs until the valley has no one left worth burning. This ends only one way." He looks down at me. "When I reclaim this territory."
I hold his gaze. His wounds are seeping through the linen I pressed to his side. He hasn't even looked at them.
"Then we help you reclaim it," I say.
"You'll need a hunter."
Velka steps out of the smoke to our left, bow in hand, home reduced to glowing cinders behind her. She looks at Tovian without flinching, which is more than most of the valley can claim tonight.
"My house is ash." She says dryly. "So I have some time."