11. Sabine
SABINE
Ipull my wool coat tighter and focus on not snapping every frozen pine needle beneath my boots.
Every step I take sounds catastrophic compared to Tovian and Vorgrym, who move through the frost-bitten dark like they were carved out of it.
No crunch. No displaced breath. Just two massive shadows gliding between the tree line ahead of me, stone-gray skin swallowed by the dark so completely that I track them mostly by the faint gleam of Tovian's eyes when he glances back to check I haven't fallen into a ravine.
I hate that he keeps checking. I hate it more that I find it reassuring.
The cold is the biting kind. The kind that crawls under your collar and sinks teeth into your collarbone.
My fingers, even inside the gloves, have gone stiff around my lantern handle, and I've stopped trying to hold the light up—Tovian made it clear with one flat look that the flame was a liability.
So now it's shuttered, and I'm navigating by moonlight and the occasional slice of frost-white clearing between the pines.
Vorgrym stops first.
He crouches, one hand dropping to the frozen ground, and even that small motion carries the kind of precision that makes my chest tighten. I move up beside him before Tovian can signal me back, and then I smell it.
"What is that?" I whisper.
Tovian's hand closes around my arm, not roughly, but the message is clear. Stay back. He angles my lantern away from the ground and I follow his gaze up—to the tree bark. Gouged deep. Shredded in long, parallel lines far higher than any animal native to these mountains could reach.
I count the sets of marks. Four trees. Five. Eight.
My stomach drops.
"That's not one scout," I say quietly. "That's not even a patrol."
Vorgrym makes a low sound in his chest that isn't quite agreement, but isn't disagreement either.
Tovian's jaw is tight. I can see the muscle working in the torchless dark because I've memorized his face whether I intended to or not. "How many?" he says.
"Enough to cover all four approaches to the valley simultaneously.
" My eyes move to the spacing between the trees, the direction the gouges face.
These marks are fresh. "They're not preparing for a single challenge.
They've already encircled us. Tharros and Flora aren't waiting for the dominance trial—they're staging a siege. "
The silence between the three of us is the loudest thing in the woods.
The bridge was old before I was born.
I can tell by the way the stone groans when Vorgrym sets his weight on it. The ravine beneath it is pure black, jagged with upthrust rock that I can hear rather than see, the wind rushing through the chasm below us making a low, hollow moan.
I'm almost across when it gives.
Not all at once. The center section buckles, drops six inches, and then Vorgrym's massive frame punches through a crumbling section of railing and he is gone—except he isn't, because gargoyle reflexes are something else entirely, and his claws catch bare stone, scrabbling for purchase before he disappears entirely.
But only barely.
His single eye is fixed upward, jaw clenched, wings useless at the angle he's hanging—no room to open them, the ravine walls too close, the momentum too sudden. He can't get leverage. His claws are slipping, grinding against ancient stone that crumbles with each second he holds.
Tovian is on the wrong side of the rockfall. I can hear him moving, stone grinding, but he's forty feet away and there isn't forty seconds left.
My pack is off my back before the thought finishes forming. The leather climbing line is already in my hands. I find the nearest trunk with both arms, loop the line twice around it, jam my heels into a frozen root cluster, and throw.
It catches him across the forearm.
"Grab it," I say in a flat and certain drone, which is impressive because my heart has exited my body entirely.
Vorgrym stares at me for a single fractured second, and then his free hand closes around the line.
The yank nearly tears my arms out of their sockets.
I hear something pop in my left shoulder and the pain is white and immediate, but I sit against it, lean back, brace everything I have into that root cluster and the tree behind me and I don’t let go. My fingers burn through the gloves. The leather bites into my palms.
Then the weight changes—Tovian's hands close over mine, and the pull disappears, and in one brutal heave Vorgrym is over the edge and on solid ground.
I fall butt-first in the frost.
Vorgrym looms above me, breathing hard in visible clouds of cold air. He looks at the line in his hands.
The great cavern is warmer than the woods, fire burning in the iron basins Tovian had the warriors restore, and the newly awakened gargoyles fill the chamber with low voices and the scrape of stone limbs. I'm half-frozen, my shoulder aching when Vorgrym steps into the firelight ahead of me.
He turns and faces me.
The assembled warriors go quiet.
He says my name—my actual name, not human or the female—and hearing it in his graveled voice is so unexpected that I forget to be cold for a moment. Then he reaches to his side and unhooks the blade.
Drakestone. Old. The hilt is wrapped in a dark and supple material that isn't leather, carved with markings that match the walls of the great cavern. He holds it out with both hands.
The salute is something I've never seen before, but I understand instinctively and I accept the blade with both hands to match.
He waits until we're in the private chamber. I'll give him that much.
The door—if you can call a slab of carved stone a door—has barely ground shut before he turns on me and the fury coming off him is so concentrated it has a physical shape.
"You could have gone over with him."
"But I didn't."
"The line could have snapped—"
"It didn't."
"Sabine."
"Tovian." I face him squarely, the drakestone blade still in my hand because I didn't think to put it down and now I'm glad I didn't—it feels like evidence. "Don't do that. Don't use my name like it's the end of a sentence."
"You are not a warrior." His voice drops low and dangerous. "You are not armored. You are not—"
"I am the reason Vorgrym is alive right now.
" Each word is sharp and certain. "I am the reason we know the valley is already encircled, because I was the one paying attention to the tree line.
I am standing here, useful, functional, and in one piece, and instead of acknowledging any of that you are furious at me for existing in this war at all. "
"I am furious because you nearly died—"
"I am not your possession, Tovian. I am not a prize or a fragile thing you get to cage to stop yourself from feeling afraid. I am in this war. I am fighting it beside you, and you can’t keep pretending I'm not."
He moves so fast I don't register it until my back is against the stone.
His hands land on the wall on either side of my head. His wings drop, closing around us, cutting off the torchlight until the world narrows down to the heat radiating off his chest and the ragged sound of his breathing and the gold of his eyes burning two inches from my face.
My own breathing has stopped.
His jaw is tight enough to crack. His knuckles, pressed to the stone beside my temples, are white.
The moment stretches—dangerous, electric, unbearable.
Then he tears himself away.
His wings snap back. His footsteps are violent against the stone floor. He doesn't speak and he doesn't look back, and the door grinds shut behind him with a rumbling finality like a mountain settling.
I stand against the cold wall, trembling, the blade in my hand and a hunger in my chest that I have absolutely no idea what to do with.