Her second letter came three weeks after the first, on a wet spring evening, by a courier who had not needed to change horses once.She had written it, she said at the top, eight nights after she found what she had gone looking for, by the light of a fire she had built herself out of flint and dry wood and Garrick's dwarf-forged striker rather than any spark of her own.I am staying longer, the letter said, and Ethan read that line four times. Longer had usually meant worse.He made himself keep reading.I found something up here, Ethan. Not a dragon out of legend waiting to hand me a shortcut—something better and harder than that. An old, scarred, half-forgotten survivor of a kind of dragon that never needed a god's fire to burn. She is teaching me, in the only way that seems to work, which is slowly, and mostly by failure. I have set myself on fire twice already—my own fire, with no violet anywhere in it, wild and unshaped and entirely mine—and both times it hurt, which her borrowed

On the fourth day the trail turned into something Garrick could read.There were furrows in the roadbed now, broad and shallow, dragged rather than walked. Garrick crouched over each set in turn and ran his fingers along the edges, the way he might read a wound to guess at the blade. Three sets, converging from three directions, all of them bending toward a single low valley that the old survey maps marked, without any comment at all, as Hollow Ground. No elevations. No water. Only the name."Farmers stopped grazing that valley two generations back," Garrick said, tracing the outline with one blunt finger by the last of the light. "Never said why. Just stopped, the way people do when the why is worse than keeping quiet. My old company captain used to say a map that goes silent in one spot is worth more than a map that talks everywhere.""It's been eating down there longer than the caravans," Nina said.She had been quiet for an hour. The Blade was humming against her palms with a low,

They did not linger. Gorvath's hunger, quieted, was still a vast thing, and Garrick was not prepared to celebrate within sight of a creature that might, on a bad day, forget itself. They had Ethan up on his horse within the hour. He could not have said how.He kept down water and nothing else. The hollowness the valley had opened in him sat under his ribs like an empty room, and every time he put bread in it his stomach refused. By evening his hands had started to tremble and would not stop. Garrick tied him to the saddle at the waist, without asking, with a length of the packhorse's rope."I've seen men come off a long siege like this," Garrick said, knotting it. "Not the wound that does it. The not-eating, after." He tugged the knot twice. "Broth tonight. Broth tomorrow. Bread when your hands stop."They made camp early. Nina boiled the broth and stood over Ethan while he drank it, a spoonful at a time, as if he were a child or a fevered soldier, and he was too tired to mind.It was

The fire had burned down to coals before Ethan noticed that none of them had said a word since they lit it. Garrick fed the coals one branch at a time. Nina sat with the Blade across her knees."Tell me," Ethan said, when the other two had settled close enough to hear his half of it. "All of it."The pause went on long enough that he wondered whether she would answer. When she did, the warmth spread out from his chest. Garrick, who could not hear her words, looked up from the fire as if a draft had shifted.His name is Zepharion, Aurelyn said. He had another, before. He does not answer to it now, and I find I cannot say it without wanting to apologize to it."What happened?"A war happened first. Mine, against someone I loved, and I ended it with a single blow. The voice did not waver. The warmth under his sternum drew tight as wire. I will tell you the whole of that another night, when you have the strength to hear it and I have the strength to say it. What matters tonight is what cam

He arrived more than he attacked.One moment he stood three strides from the cross. The next he was inside Nina's guard, with no wind-up, no shift of weight to read and answer: simply present where he had not been a heartbeat before. Nina got the Blade up by pure reflex and took the first blow on the flat. Cold blue-white light met the grey nothing of his gauntleted fist, and the crack of it went through Ethan's teeth from six feet away, like stone splitting, and threw her ten feet back into the dead earth. She skidded. The Blade nearly left her hand."Nina!" Garrick was already moving, low and quick, sword up in the two-handed guard he taught in every practice yard. Zepharion turned to him the way a man turns to swat a fly. One parry, with the back of that same gauntlet. It met Garrick's descending blade at exactly the angle that would send the whole force of the blow back into the steel instead of taking it, and Ethan watched the sword break at the hilt. The pieces went spinning into