8. Leoric
LEORIC
We leave the watchtower before the storm has spent itself.
Dawn comes thin and gray, dragging light across broken stone and fresh snow.
No one speaks much while we clear the ruined floor and check the horses.
The collapse has changed the tower behind us.
One corner gone. One wall cracked lower than it had been the night before.
The sort of damage a person looks at once and then keeps walking from, because standing still only teaches you how close it came.
Corrine does not look at me. That is not true.
She looks when she thinks I am occupied.
At my shoulder. At the place the beam caught my back.
At the hand I keep flexing because the cold has found every old injury and introduced it to the new one.
Each glance is quick. Controlled. Irritated, as if concern is a debt she resents discovering in her own pocket.
I prefer her anger. It can be answered. Whatever passed between us in the tower has followed us out here into the snow. Theren notices. Of course he does. He says nothing, which is worse than any warning he could have given me.
By midmorning, the sky clears enough to show the route ahead.
Narrow stone throat. High ridges. Too many places for archers or casters to hide.
I know the risk before we reach it, but the safer road east through Vareth would cost us three days, and those days are time for whoever sent assassins into my estate to close every road around us. Corrine sees the problem too.
"Bad route," she says.
"Yes."
"And we're taking it anyway."
"Yes."
Her mouth tightens, but she does not argue. That bothers me more than it should. Speed has already made the choice for us. I put Theren and two of the escorts at the rear and move us through the narrow channel between ridges at a pace that doesn't allow for comfort.
Corrine has been quiet since the watchtower.
The quieter she is, the more I'm aware of what caused it, and the weight of being seen in that way by that specific person is not something I have a clean tool for managing.
I move her to the middle of the formation and keep my attention on the ridgeline.
The mercenaries are good. I know it in the first three seconds—not from their positioning, which is competent, but from the silence before it.
Amateur ambushes are loud. These ones held their positions through wind and cold long enough that when the first ward-break hits the back of our group it comes without warning, clean, the kind of timing that costs money to train.
At least two casters. One near the left ridge, one somewhere I haven't seen yet, and that second unknown position is the thing I keep going back to while I'm moving.
I pull the compression ward from the brace on my forearm and release it upslope in the direction the first strike came from.
It hits stone and explodes in a concussive ring—not precision work, just noise and debris and the moment of disruption that lets me close on the nearest fighter before he's reoriented.
He's fast. I'm faster, and I've been doing this since before his kind were hired out of border towns.
Corrine is fighting in my peripheral vision. No wasted movement, economical, using terrain better than most trained soldiers. But she's fighting with what they left her and what's left her isn't enough for this.
The second caster opens from the right ridge. The strike is aimed at Corrine, not at me, and that targeting tells me the ambush has a list. I redirect with a deflected ward that costs my left arm's full extension and sends fire up the scarring on that side. I mark the pain and keep moving.
I catch the fear on her face before I process why it matters that I do.
Not fear of the mercenaries. Fear of me.
She has seen me angry, and controlled. She's seen enough of the scars to understand what violence left behind.
But this is different. This is the thing under the title, the discipline, and every civilized word I have forced over the years.
The old battlefield answer. Fast. Brutal.
Empty of mercy because mercy slows the hand.
Her face changes when I break the nearest fighter's wrist and drive him into the ridge wall. She does not turn away. That is worse.
She doesn't frighten easily. But the way she's looking at me—at what I've just done, at whatever I'm wearing on my face while I do it—that look is something I would rather not have earned and cannot take back. I put it away and find the second caster.
She's separated before I can prevent it. A crevice in the rock face, a fighter cutting her off from the group, the terrain doing exactly what I knew it might when I chose this route. I track her position by sound, and then it changes and it's wrong. I stop making the tactically correct decision.
Theren will have something to say about this.
I know it while I'm already going—abandoning the high position, moving downslope through exposed terrain, making myself visible to every fighter still standing.
The man holding Corrine is careful with her.
Containing, not killing. Bounty work. Someone has her name on a collection order, which means money spent on certain intelligence, and that also means this ambush connects to something larger than a patrol's luck.
When he realizes I am coming, his grip changes.
The blade moves from warning to execution.
I reach them before he decides how to handle her.
The ward leaves my hand before I get close—a pressure burst, short range, the kind that doesn't need accuracy when the target is standing still.
It takes him off his feet and into the rock face hard enough that he doesn't get up.
Corrine drops with him, chain still in his grip, and I cross the last few meters and get it free.
She's breathing. Blood darkens the hair above her ear, but she is breathing.
I'm bleeding from a cut across my left side where a blade found the gap between my coat and the armor plate beneath it.
I don't register how deep until Theren's voice comes from somewhere above and the variables have been resolved.
My body starts reporting what it was too busy to mention earlier. Deep enough.
We split because staying together gives the mercenaries one trail to follow.
Theren takes two men north with enough noise to look like retreat.
The remaining soldier takes the southern with the spare packs.
Corrine and I go into the cave system on the east face because I am bleeding too badly to outrun pursuit and because the bounty hunter's orders make one thing clear: she cannot be taken.
The stone closes around us, and it's quiet in a way that means we're either safe or not yet dead.
She doesn't wait for instructions. She's already pulling the pack from my shoulder, already assessing what she has to work with, moving like she has done field medicine in worse conditions than this.
I sit against the cave wall because the alternative is showing her I'm having difficulty staying upright, and I've shown her enough of what she wasn't meant to see.
"Take the coat off." She demands.
I listen to her. The shirt beneath is dark and sticking, and removing it produces a sensation I don't make a sound about. She works without reacting—hands moving across skin that isn't straightforward to navigate. I watch the cave entrance and keep my breathing even.
"You abandoned your position." Not an accusation. A fact being handled.
"Yes."
"Theren looked like he wanted to kill you himself."
"Theren can want things."
Her hands pause briefly, then resume. "Why did you come down?"
"The ambush list had your name on it and you were separated."
"That's a tactical answer."
"It's the only one I have."
She doesn't push it, which means either she believes me or she doesn't want what's behind it any more than I want to give it. Her fingers reach the upper edge of the cut where it crosses into older damage, and the care in that pressure is worse than roughness would be.
"You frightened me." Quiet. "Out there. The way you were—"
"I know."
"I've seen people fight. I've fought. That wasn't—"
"I know what it was." My voice stays level. "It's what I am. You should remember that."
She freezes in place for a moment. Then she finishes, ties it off, and sits back on her heels and stares at me. The cave gives us almost no room. That makes her harder to ignore.
She is so near that I can see the ash caught at her temple. I can see her cut above her ear has slowed but not stopped, and when she reaches for another strip of cloth, her knee brushes mine and neither of us moves.
Her eyes drop to my mouth. I should move first. Away from it with the same clean certainty I know blade angles and escape routes and how many men are needed to hold a pass against superior numbers. Instead, I admire her mouth too.
The cave narrows around the silence. Her hand is still against my side, warm through blood and bandage, and the instinct in me that has survived every battlefield by cutting away weakness does not move quickly enough.
I lean half an inch before I stop. Half an inch is enough to ruin things. Her breath changes. Mine doesn't, because I do not allow it to.
I move my eyes to the cave wall instead of her face.
She is still connected to the fire. Still technically under my authority.
The power between us hasn't shifted because we've shared a hard week and she's stopped looking at me like something she's planning to survive.
All of it remains true. None of it has been resolved, and I will not pretend otherwise because the alternative is the kind of mistake that can't be walked back once it's made.
I keep all this fixed in my mind and breathe through the rest.
"Get some sleep. We move before dawn."
She doesn't answer. I listen to her settle against the cave wall and I watch the entrance. Seven years hunting this woman, and I never once prepared for this. I don't know how to win it. I'm no longer certain I want to.