They did not move again that night. Ethan sat a long time with the hammer's name laid on top of everything else he had been carrying since the funeral: the keep stair, the bloom, the order in his coat, and now a weapon that had once broken a world.He did what he had once promised Celestia he would try to do more often. Not just feel the fear. Turn it over. Look at its underside. Ask what it was actually made of.A coal fell in on itself and threw up a brief shower of sparks. Underneath the fear was how quickly some small hungry part of him had already reached for yes the moment she said it might be his."You're allowed to say no," Nina said quietly, across the fire. She was slumped with exhaustion, but her eyes stayed sharp. "Whatever it is. Whatever it costs. I don't think anybody would blame you for deciding some debts aren't yours.""I know." He turned the thought over again, out loud this time. "That's not the part I'm afraid of. I'm afraid of wanting it too easily. When Seraphina

They broke camp at first light, stiff and underslept, and turned the horses south and west toward the crossroads and the long road to Ironroot. The bare northern country gave way by degrees to grass, and the grass to trees. Garrick set an easier pace than the ride north had allowed.On the second morning Garrick unwrapped what he called breakfast and held it out to Nina with the air of a man presenting a petition."That's the heel of a loaf," she said."It's the heel of a loaf with the crust still on. Soldiers have marched on less.""Soldiers have marched on this exact loaf. It's the one from the last village." She rapped it against her knee, and it rang. "It's furniture, Garrick.""Soak it.""In what?""The tea.""The tea is hot water and a root you pulled out of a ditch." She tore a piece off anyway, with both hands and some language, and dropped it in her tin cup, and watched it sit there. "It's not softening.""Give it time."Ethan took the other half, split it with the flat of his

The mountain road climbed hard on the second day past the crossroads. Farmland gave way to bare granite and switchbacks cut by hands long dead. The air thinned until even Garrick's breathing was audible on the grades. By midafternoon the road had narrowed into what the old dwarven waystones marked simply as the Narrows: granite walls close on either side, the sky a grey ribbon, every hoofbeat ringing off stone that swallowed every other sound."Rurik warned me about this stretch," Garrick said, eyeing the walls. "Only road through for forty miles either way. Also said it's taken two of his couriers since the thaw, and nobody can tell him how, so I wouldn't—"He stopped. His head tilted.Garrick went quiet in the saddle. His hand went to the reins with a sudden, unnecessary care."Eileen," he said. Then louder, turning in the saddle to search the rocks above: "That was Eileen. Calling me. Clear as anything." His weathered face had gone the color of candle wax. "She's calling and I can't

The mountain kingdom announced itself by sound before sight: the distant, steady rhythm of hammers on stone and iron, a heartbeat carried up through the rock of the pass long before the gates came into view. Somewhere around the last switchback Ethan caught his own pulse keeping time with it. The air changed as they came down, hot metal and stone dust, stronger with every turn, until the road opened onto a broad shelf of leveled rock and the gates stood in front of them: two doors of black iron set into a cliff so sheer it looked as if the mountain had decided to open. The hinges and seams were worked so closely that the best ironwork in Carosso looked crude beside them.Rurik met them on the shelf. He had come down from the gatehouse the moment the watch called three riders on the Narrows road, and he greeted them like a man proven right about a debt he had been insisting on for months. His beard was freshly trimmed. He looked more solid than Ethan remembered him from the weeks after

Brogan Deephammer's workshop lay at the bottom of Ironroot's tiers. Rurik led Ethan down to it by a long spiral past forges where younger smiths fell silent as the two of them went by, their hammers stopping one after another in a wave that ran ahead of Ethan's feet like water parting. The air grew warmer with every level, thick with the smell of hot iron and quenching oil, until at last they came to a chamber set apart from the rest, larger and quieter, lit by a single great furnace burning low. Its coals pulsed a deep, patient red and threw long shadows across walls hung with tools whose purposes Ethan could not guess.Its master was a stooped, white-bearded dwarf, smaller than Rurik and smaller than the king, working alone at an anvil despite the hour. His hands were the first thing Ethan noticed. Old burns gone silver-white, a missing fingertip, knuckles swollen out of true."Havram sent word down," Brogan said, without turning from the half-shaped length of steel. Each blow fell p