Garrick had the party assembled within two days, exactly as he'd promised, and exactly as small as Ethan had insisted—himself, Garrick, and Nina, three horses and a fourth for supplies, no banners, no honor guard, nothing that looked like an Emperor riding out to a war he hadn't yet let himself name aloud, even to the people riding beside him.The courtyard held its breath in the grey pre-dawn the way it always did before a departure, cobblestones slick with a mist that hadn't decided yet whether it wanted to be rain, the palace's east wing still dark behind them save for a single lit window Ethan didn't let himself identify by name. He checked his own tack twice, more out of needing something for his hands to do than any real doubt in the saddle work, and watched his breath fog in the cold the way it hadn't, three weeks ago, in the warmer air of a funeral he still sometimes forgot, waking, that he'd

Ethan walked into the valley alone, against every objection Garrick had breath enough to voice—and Garrick had voiced a great many of them, in the space of the handful of seconds it took Ethan to hand off his horse's lead and start walking, ranging from this is reckless to at least let me come as far as the bone-line to, finally, a low and furious if you die out there I am going to be the one who has to explain it to Celestia, which had almost, almost been enough to make Ethan turn back. He walked anyway, because he had learned—from Seraphina, from Aurelyn, from a year of watching kindness succeed where blades had failed—that some things could only be approached by someone will

The northern road climbed steadily for two days into country Ethan had never had reason to visit—thin soil, wind-bent trees leaning permanently away from some prevailing gale none of them ever actually felt, the kind of landscape that looked, even at midday, like it was already halfway into dusk, the light thin and slanted no matter the hour. The border villages they passed through grew sparser and quieter with every mile, small huddles of stone cottages that thinned first to a handful of houses and then to little more than a well and a shrine, the last true settlements before the land gave itself over entirely to whatever country lay beyond.The fourth village they reached sat entirely empty, and it announced its wrongness the way the stripped caravans had, in the particular quality of a silence that had nothing natural in it—no dogs, no chickens scratching in dooryards, no smoke from a single chimney in

The two days north from the stream passed in a tightening quiet, the country growing steadily more barren with every mile, wind-bent trees giving way at last to no trees at all, only rock and thin grey scrub and a sky that seemed, this far north, permanently undecided about whether it wanted to storm. They spoke little, conserving something none of them could quite name—not breath, not exactly, but a kind of nerve they all sensed they would need in fuller measure than usual before the two days were through.The stone cross stood at the crest of a barren hill two days further north, exactly where the oldest border maps marked it and exactly as unremarkable as a marker for something so old ought to have any right to be—weathered granite, taller than a man, its face worn past any inscription age hadn't already erased, standing alone in ground so thoroughly dead that not even the hardy border scrub dared take