The wind found Maren Ashford first, knifing between the black pines with a sound like tearing cloth. She pulled her hood tighter against the bite of it and stopped at the edge of the hollow, one hand braced on the grey shoulder of a standing stone. Below her, the valley ran north in a long crooked spine of frozen brook and stunted fir, and somewhere out past the far ridge a wolf was singing, a high thin note that climbed and climbed until it snapped off into silence.
Kael Duskmere came up beside her, breathing hard, his boots loud on the frost-rimed gravel. He carried no cloak. He had thrown it away two days ago, claiming it slowed him down. He had not yet admitted that the clasp had been broken for a year.
"You would think," he panted, "that after a thousand years of wolves, one of them would learn a tune."
"You would think," Maren said, without looking at him, "that after a thousand years of Duskmere sons, one of them would learn to bring a cloak."
She set off down the slope before he could answer, choosing her footing on the slick black needles. The cold reached through her boots and settled against the soles of her feet like a second skin. Pine resin stung the air. Somewhere beneath the wind she could smell old smoke, though no fire had burned in the hollow for a hundred years, or so the shepherds said.
Behind her, Kael swore softly and followed.
They had been walking since before dawn. The hollow opened to them in pieces: first a corridor of pines so close together their branches laced overhead like fingers pressed in prayer, then a clearing of waist-high bracken gone silver with rime, then a low ridge of granite boulders arranged in no pattern Maren could read. The standing stones of the hollow were different from the Wardens' waystones. Those were cut, shaped, set upright by human hands in deliberate lines. These had simply risen, or so the old stories claimed, when the first wolves had howled at the first cold moon. They leaned at wild angles. Their surfaces were laced with veins of quartz that caught the thin sun and threw it back in pale splinters.
Kael paused by one of them as they passed, brushing frost from its face with his bare fingers.
"Don't," Maren said. "You don't know what the hollow marks."
"I know what this one says, at least." He traced a line of runes with his thumbnail. "Ward-mark. Warden Vell taught me to read them before he threw me out."
"Vell didn't throw you out. You refused the binding."
"Same result."
"It is not the same result, and you know it."
He straightened, rubbing his fingers together to warm them. The colour had gone from his knuckles. He did not seem to notice. "The northern ridge path follows the old ward-line," he said, in the tone of a man returning to a subject he had not enjoyed the first time. "If we keep to it, we come out above the Mire well before dark. The hollow proper is to the east of us. We skirt it. We do not go in."
"We do not skirt anything." Maren had stopped three paces on. The wind pressed at her back, patient, waiting. "The Mire is a dead end. The hunters turned it into a snare a season ago. I was told."
"You were told. By whom? The shepherds who will not come within a league of this place? The peddler in the last town who sold us bread that tasted of chalk?"
"By people who know these lands better than your father's steward ever did."
"My father's steward," Kael said, with a small bow of his head, "has not held office in four years. You are behind the times, Ashford."
She turned on him. The wind caught her hood and dragged it back from her hair, and the cold took her scalp and her ears at once.
"Don't," she said. "Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Use my house like a club because your own has made its choices."
He had the grace to look away. For a moment he only stood there, one hand on the stone, the wind plastering his shirt against his chest. He was thinner than he had been in autumn. She could see the line of his collarbone through the linen.
"The northern path is sound," he said, quieter. "I have read the runes."
"You have read three runes. On one stone. In a hollow you have never set foot in before this morning."
"Four runes."
"Kael."
"Three and a half. One was worn past reading."
"Then we are trusting our lives to a half."
He smiled at that, quick and lopsided. "We are trusting our lives to a man who can read half a rune in a wind that would flay the skin off a goat. It could be worse. It could be me alone, with no Ashford at my back to scowl."
She did not smile back. She turned and walked on, and after a moment she heard him follow.
The brook appeared without warning. One step there was frost-shattered bracken, the next there was ice, black and glassy, that ran across their path in a crooked sheet. Maren stopped so quickly her boot heel skidded. She caught herself on a low branch and stood listening. Under the ice the water still moved, a faint continuous grinding, like a millstone turning very slowly in the dark.
Kael came up beside her and stopped. They stood for a breath, two breaths, listening. The wind had dropped. The wolf on the far ridge had stopped singing. In the silence the hollow felt closer, as if the pines had leaned in to overhear.
"Northern path," Kael said. "Over the ridge. We cross the brook here, climb, and follow the ward-line east."
"The brook is unsafe. The ice is rotten at the edges. You can hear it."
"I can hear it. I am choosing to cross it anyway."
"You are choosing to drown us both, more like."
"Then I will drown first, and you can have the satisfaction of saying you told me so."
"Kael." She spoke through her teeth. "The buried waystone trail is half a league south. The ice is thicker there, the crossing is marked, and we come into the hollow proper below the old shrine. That is the safer route. That has always been the safer route."
"That has always been the safer route," he agreed, "if what you want is to walk into the middle of the hollow where neither house's banner flies and the wolves remember old names. We skirt. We do not go in."
"Wardens go in. Wardens have always gone in."
"We are not Wardens."
"We are what is left of them."
The word hung between them. She watched it land. Kael's jaw tightened. He looked away from her, out across the ice, and for a moment she saw something move behind his face, quick and unguarded, before he shut it down.
Then he stepped onto the ice.
The sound it made was small and sharp, like a knuckle cracking. He took a second step. A third. The ice held. He turned back to her, arms slightly spread, the picture of a man balancing.
"Coming?"
"Come off that," she said. "Kael, come off that ice."
"Tell me I am wrong about the runes."
"You are wrong about more than the runes, you reckless, stubborn, insufferable, you are wrong about the wind and the hour and the crossing and you are wrong about me. Get off the ice."
"Tell me," he said, "that the buried waystone trail is safer."
"It is not safer. It is longer. There is a difference."
"Admit it is not safer."
She clenched her fists inside her sleeves. The cold had worked its way through the wool and into the joints of her fingers. Across the ice, Kael waited, balanced, the pale splinters of quartz light moving across his shirt.
"Admit it," he said again, softer. "And I will come back."
She wanted to hit him. She wanted to put her shoulder into his chest and shove him off the ice and into the brook and let the cold water finish what the wind had started. She could feel the shape of the blow in her arms, the way it would land, the way he would look at her from the black water with that same lopsided smile. She took a step toward the edge of the ice.
She stopped.
The runes. She looked past him at the standing stone on the far bank, the one he had brushed frost from an hour ago. From this angle she could see the ward-mark more clearly. She could see the half-rune he had counted as half, and she could see the line that joined it to a smaller mark above, which he had missed, which she had missed, which changed the reading entirely. She knew the reading. She had been taught it by a Warden who had died at the Mire. The ward did not run east along the ridge. It ran south, under the bracken, toward the buried waystone trail. It had always run south.
She stood very still. The wind rose again, pressing at her back, and the pines leaned, and somewhere in the hollow a wolf began to sing.
"Get off the ice," she said, quietly. "Kael. Get off the ice. You are right about the runes."
He blinked. He did not move at first. Then he stepped back toward the bank, slow, careful, his eyes on hers the whole way. When his boots hit the frozen bracken he let out a breath that whitened in the air, and he looked at her, and she saw again what had moved behind his face when she had said the word Wardens.
"Say it again," he said.
"You are right. The buried waystone trail. South."
"Not that part."
She shook her head.
He looked at her a moment longer. Then he turned south, and she followed, and behind them the wolf's note climbed and climbed and snapped off into silence, and the hollow closed over their tracks like water.
The waystone trail swallowed them within the first quarter mile. Bracken rose to Kael's chest, and Maren had to push through it with her forearm held across her face, the dry stalks crackling against her sleeves like thin bones. The ground softened beneath their boots. Frost clung longer here where the bracken held the cold, and when they found the first buried stone, half-eaten by the earth, she knew the trail was old. The runes on its face had been worn to ghosts of themselves, the cuts filled with moss and lichen, but she could still read the slant of the old script. Southbound. Southbound.
Kael walked with his head down, watching the stones surface and submerge in the bracken like the spines of a long drowned thing. He did not speak. Twice he glanced back at her, and twice he looked forward again, and she read in the set of his shoulders that he was measuring what she had said on the ice. The word Wardens. The recognition in her voice that had not been feigned. He was cataloguing it, the way his father had taught him to catalogue a room before he entered it.
By late afternoon the bracken thinned and the pines drew close, and the land began to lift toward a shoulder of bare rock that hunched out of the forest like the back of some sleeping beast. Kael stopped at a run of standing stones, six of them in a crooked line, and he turned to her with his hand raised.
"There," he said. "The hollow. You can see the way in."
She saw it. The outcropping of granite curved overhead, leaving a pocket of dark beneath it, sheltered from the wind. A thin stream ran along the base, half frozen, threading between rocks that had fallen from the face above. Pine litter lay thick and dry on the ground. Smoke-blackened stones sat in a rough circle at the back, old but not ancient. She smelled cold ash and something fainter, the resinous bite of pine sap that had bled and frozen on the bark of the leaning trees.
"Someone has used this before," she said.
"Hunters, mostly. The Wardens used it too, in the old days. They kept it marked on their charts." He stepped carefully over the stream and ducked beneath the lip of the granite. "The wards on the standing stones will mask our fire from anything that hunts by sight. I will set a small one. Nothing that will draw the wrong kind of attention."
He said it like a confession. She watched him kneel at the mouth of the hollow and trace a sigil on the ground with his fingertip, his lips moving without sound. The sigil flared a dull amber, then dimmed, and the air along the rock face thickened slightly, the way the air thickens above sun-warmed stone. A ward. A working. Her stomach turned.
"Where did you learn that?"
He did not look up. "I told you. From Vell. Before he died."
"And before he taught it to you, did you know what it would do?"
"Yes." He sat back on his heels. "I knew."
She left it there. There was no clean way to unpick the thread of a thing like that in the open air, with the cold settling around them, and she had learned a long time ago that some conversations needed walls around them and a fire at their backs.
They worked in silence. Kael gathered wood from the deadfall at the edge of the hollow, snapping the branches across his knee with a sound like a rifle shot, while Maren cleared the pine litter from the fire circle and banked the old ash with her boot. The stream offered water, clear as glass and sharp with cold, and she filled the small kettle she had carried since the Mire. When the fire caught, the hollow warmed by degrees, the granite above holding the heat close, and the smoke drew up along the rock and dispersed into the pines without a column visible from more than a few yards out.
They ate what they had. Hard bread. A strip of dried meat that tasted of salt and smoke. Kael unwrapped a small twist of paper and shook out a measure of tea leaves, dark and fragrant, and she smelled rosemary and something else, something sharper, that she did not recognise.
"Where did you get that?"
"Maren's tea, if you must know. I bought it in Carvenford before the river froze." He glanced at her, and the corner of his mouth lifted. "Your namesake has a good hand with herbs."
"I am not a namesake," she said, too quickly.
"No. You are not." He poured the water. The steam rose between them, and his eyes dropped to the fire, and the lift of his mouth softened into something less sure. "Forgive me. The joke was a poor one."
She wrapped her hands around the tin cup he passed her and let the warmth climb into her fingers. The hollow was quiet. Even the wind had gone soft against the granite, and the only sounds were the small ones of the fire and the stream and the occasional settling of the rock above them as the cold worked at its seams. She watched him across the flames and thought how strange it was to be sitting with a Duskmere, in a hollow that had been marked on Warden charts, drinking tea out of a battered tin cup, while somewhere to the north the Wraith-Lord's banners moved in the dark.
Kael set his cup down. He reached beneath his shirt, and the chain that held whatever it was came out with him, a thin band of dark metal that caught the firelight in places where it had been worn smooth. He lifted the thing over his head and held it in his palm, and the light found it.
The fragment was a hand's length of broken blade, snapped clean across at some long-ago angle. The steel was not like any steel she had seen. It held the firelight the way water holds the moon, in a soft, even gleam that did not flicker, that did not dim when the flames shifted. The broken edge was dark and rough, the grain of the metal visible to her as fine as frost on a window. The other edge, the cutting edge, was bright. Three centuries, Kael had said of it, and she believed him. The edge had not surrendered a single line of its keenness. It sat in his palm like a sliver of white flame, and the air around it tasted of old metal and colder stone.
"Sunsteel," he said. "Or what is left of it. The other half is gone."
She did not reach for it. She sat with her hands around her cup and looked at it, and the hollow around her seemed to lean in a little, the way a room leans when you have heard something you cannot take back.
"My father believes this is the key to the trove beneath the Drowned Tower," Kael said. He did not say it lightly. He said it the way a man says a thing he has argued with himself about for years. "He has believed it since before I was born. The whole house has believed it. Three generations of Duskmere have held this fragment and looked for the other half, and three generations have failed to find it. My grandfather thought the Wraith-Lord's line had it. My father thought the old Wardens had hidden it. My brother thinks it is a story we tell ourselves because we have nothing else."
"And you?"
He turned the fragment in his hand. The light moved along the unbroken edge and came to rest at the broken end, where the steel ended in a rough dark line.
"I think my father is right," he said. "I think the other half exists. I think the trove is real. I think my father has been searching for it in the wrong place, with the wrong tools, for the wrong reasons. I think he will burn the realm down to find it, and I think the trove will not give him what he wants even if he does." He looked up at her. "And I think you knew the word Wardens before I said it, and you knew the reading on that standing stone, and you knew it because someone taught you, and I would very much like to know who."
The fire cracked between them. A knot of resin burst in the wood and sent a small plume of sparks up against the granite. She watched the sparks die.
"My mother taught me," she said.
He waited.
"Not the fragments. Not the reading. The framework. The Wardens took children from the lesser houses and gave them back as something else. Maren Ashford. A girl of no consequence. The right age. The right look. My mother signed the papers without reading them, because my father had died at the Mire and there was no one else to sign them, and because she thought it was an honour." Maren turned the cup in her hands. "It was not an honour. It was a purchase. The Wardens bought me with a pension and a sealed letter, and they made of me what they wanted, and when the Mire took them they did not come back for me."
She set the cup down on the stone beside her. The tea had gone cold.
"I do not know what you want me to say."
"I want you to say what you are thinking," Kael said. "You looked at that fragment the way you looked at that standing stone. You recognised it."
"I did not recognise it."
"Liar."
The word sat between them. She did not flinch from it. She had been called worse, by better, and she had learned that the truth of a wound is not in the word but in the silence that follows it. She looked at the fragment in his hand. She looked at the bright unbroken edge of it, the gleam that did not move with the fire.
"There was a chamber in my mother's house," she said, quietly. "A small room behind the pantry, with a door that was not like the other doors. Iron-banded. Warded. I was forbidden from it. My mother said it held her mother's effects, papers, and nothing more. I believed her. I believed her for years." She paused. "There was a lock on the door. The key was not on her ring. The key was not in the house. I used to lie awake at night and listen to the sounds from behind that door, and there were sounds, Kael, the kind that are not made by papers in a trunk."
"What kind of sounds?"
"Cold ones. The sound of metal moving against metal. A breath in a room with no one in it." She looked at him. "I asked her once. I asked her what was behind the door, and she took me by the shoulders and she said, Maren, do not ask me again. Do not ask me ever again. And I never did."
The hollow listened. The granite above them held the cold of the coming night against its underside, and the first stars were beginning to show in the strip of sky above the outcrop. She could hear Kael breathing. She could hear the small hush of his thumb against the edge of the fragment as he turned it in his hand.
"When did she die?" he asked.
"Three years ago. The Wraith-Lord's men came for the tax. They came a second time. They came a third time." She did not look away from the fire. "I was not there. I had gone to the river to wash. When I came back the house was burning, and the door behind the pantry was open. The room beyond it was empty. The trunk was gone. The floor was bare. Whatever she had kept in that room, she had taken with her when she went, or she had sent it ahead. Or she had never let it stay in one place for long."
She stopped. She had not meant to say that much. She had not meant to give him the shape of the empty room, the cold that had breathed out of it when the fire took the ward off the door, the blackened circle on the floor where the trunk had stood. She had carried that picture alone for three years, and she had not expected it to come up so easily in a hollow beneath a granite outcrop, with a Duskmere sitting across a fire from her, holding half a blade that had no business existing in any man's hand.
"You think she had the other half," Kael said.
"I think my mother kept secrets from me that I will not live long enough to count. I think she loved me in her way. I think she would have let me burn in that house to keep them safe." She looked at him across the fire. "I think, if she had the other half of your blade, then the trove your father is hunting is not beneath the Drowned Tower at all. It is wherever she sent it. And she is three years dead, and I do not know where that is."
The fragment lay in his palm, the unbroken edge bright as a sliver of moon, the broken edge dark as a closed eye. He looked at it for a long time. He did not close his hand around it. He did not put it back beneath his shirt. He held it out across the fire, the chain dangling from his wrist, and the light ran along the edge and did not waver.
"Then we go and find out," he said.
The hollow settled around them. The stream went on with its small work under the ice. Somewhere in the pines a branch let go of its hold on its neighbour and fell with a soft thump into the snow. She looked at the fragment, and she looked at the man who held it, and she thought of the empty room behind the pantry, and of her mother's hands on her shoulders, and of the sound of cold metal moving against cold metal in a house that no longer stood.
She reached across the fire. She did not take the fragment. She laid her fingers against the back of his hand, where the skin was warm, and she felt the chain brush against her knuckles, and she felt the faint hum of the steel through his bones, a vibration so low it was almost a thought.
"Show me the edge," she said.
He turned the fragment in his hand. The edge caught the light, and the light did not move.
She looked at it for a long time. Then she withdrew her hand and sat back, and the hollow closed over them like a cupped palm, and the fire burned on between them, and above the outcrop the first true cold of the night settled in.
had burned to coals when she woke. Not the coals' silence woke her, nor the cold, though the cold had tightened until her breath came out in pale shards that did not quite disperse. Something else. A pressure in the air behind her eyes, a thin ring of wrongness like a struck bell heard through water.
She sat up without sound. The bedroll crackled beneath her. Across the embers Kael lay on his side with his arm flung over his face, and his breathing was the even breathing of a man who had not heard what she had heard. The fragment lay in his loose hand, the chain coiled against his palm like a sleeping thing.
She did not call his name. She rose to her knees and turned her head toward the pines, and she let the cold into her the way her mother had taught her, not as a guest but as a current, and the current ran through her blood and showed her what the air was made of.
It was made of ice. A long shape of ice moved between the trunks, low to the ground, too long for any beast she knew. The shape did not walk. It slid. Frost formed on the bark where it passed and did not melt, and the needles it brushed went white and brittle and rang faintly like glass.
Maren stood up.
Her hands were bare. She had not thought to pull on her gloves, and the cold of the hollow bit at her fingers, but the cold she called was colder than that, colder than the cold of any night, colder than the cold of the stream under its skin of ice. She drew it up through her palms and into her wrists and felt her own skin go numb and then go past numb into a kind of clarity, and when she breathed out, what came out was not vapour but a pale, fine mist that drifted toward the pines and lay along the snow like a veil.
She spoke a word. Not loudly. The word was old, and the old words did not need to be loud.
The veil became a wall. The wall became a corridor of white that ran from her open palms to the shape between the pines, and the shape slid into it and was caught, and the corridor folded around it like a throat swallowing, and the frost cracked and spat and the shape screamed, if shapes could scream, in a voice like glass breaking under a boot heel.
Kael woke.
He sat up with a sound like a man pulled from deep water, and for a moment his face was the face of a boy, not the man she had ridden beside for six days, and then the man came back into his eyes and he was on his feet with the fragment in his hand and he did not know what he was facing because the frost had eaten the shape's outline and what was left was a dark core of cold that the cold she had made could not quite kill.
"Maren." His voice was hoarse. "Maren, step back."
She did not step back. She could not. The cold she had called was still in her, still pouring out of her, and if she broke the corridor now the shape would burst out of it and into the hollow and into them both, and the frost would take them in their bedrolls. So she held. She held with her hands out and her fingers white and her wrists aching and the word still on her tongue, and the shape writhed at the far end of the corridor and grew darker, not lighter, as the cold pressed in.
Then the brand woke.
She did not see it at first. She saw Kael's face. She saw his face change. The hoarseness went out of it and what came in was a kind of terrible recognition, and his hand went to his left shoulder as though something had bitten him there, and the fragment in his other hand flared once with a light that was not fire and was not frost but something between, something that ate both.
He did not cry out. That was the worst of it. He made no sound at all. He only stood with his hand on his shoulder and his face going white beneath the tan, and the place where his hand pressed began to glow through the cloth of his shirt, a black glow, a glow that had no heat to it, and the glow spread down his arm in a slow spiral she knew, she had seen the like of it drawn in old books in the library at Thornhollow, the spiral of the binding that the old lords used to mark their second sons when the second sons would not serve.
The shadowfire came out of him.
It came out through the cloth and did not burn the cloth. It came out as a black tongue of light that licked at the air and found the corridor she had made and did not go down the corridor but came at her along the ground, curling around the snow, leaving the snow untouched but the air above it screaming with a cold so deep it was its own kind of burning.
She tried to drop the corridor. Her hands would not move. The cold held her open the way a hook holds a fish, and the shadowfire came on, and she thought of her mother's hands on her shoulders and of the empty room behind the pantry and of the sound of cold metal moving against cold metal, and she thought these things very clearly and very fast, and then the shadowfire was at her feet.
Kael moved.
He did not think. She could see that later, when she thought of it. He did not think, because if he had thought he would have known what the brand could do and he would have stepped back and let her burn. He moved the way a man moves when the body outruns the mind, and his hand came off his shoulder and went to the fragment in his other hand and the fragment met the shadowfire and the shadowfire screamed, a sound no one could hear but both of them felt in the roots of their teeth, and the spiral on his shoulder pulled taut like a rope being hauled and he fell to his knees in the snow with a sound that was not a word.
The shadowfire did not stop. It poured out of him and into the fragment and the fragment drank it, and the fragment grew hot in his hand, hot enough that she heard the skin of his palm hiss, and still he held it. He held it with both hands now and the chain bit into the bones of his wrist and the brand on his shoulder writhed and dimmed and flared again and he bore down on it with his whole weight as though he were trying to crush a snake against the ground.
"Down," he said through his teeth. "Down, damn you, down."
The brand did not obey him. The brand had been put on him by a lord, and the lord was not him, and the lord's will was stronger than his, or had been once. But Kael's hands were the hands of the son, and the blood in them was the blood of the father, and something in the brand knew the difference, and what it knew it feared. The black glow shuddered. It pulled back along the snow. It climbed up his arm again and went into his shoulder and the cloth there smouldered faintly, not with fire but with the memory of fire, and Kael slumped forward with his forehead in the snow and his shoulders heaving.
The frost-wraith was gone. Whether the wraith had fled or had been eaten by what came out of him, she could not tell. The corridor she had made was still standing, pale and thin in the dark, and she let it go
The corridor went out of Maren's hands like a held breath, and the dark of the hollow folded back over them both. She stood for a moment with her fingers still half-curved around the shape of it, feeling the absence of her working as a kind of cold in her own wrists. Then she went to her knees in the snow beside Kael.
He had not moved. His forehead was still pressed into the trampled white and his breath came in shallow, shuddering pulls, and the chain about his wrist lay slack against the ground. The fragment he had held was gone, or rather it had gone back into his hand, she could see the shape of it through the reddened skin of his palm, a shadow that was darker than the skin around it. The brand on his shoulder was quiet. The spiral lay still. The cloth there had not burned through after all. Only the smell of it was wrong, a hot-iron smell that did not belong in a place this cold.
"Kael." She said his name low and put her hand on the back of his neck. He was trembling. His skin was the temperature of the snow around them, and she could not tell whether that was because the heat had gone out of him or because the cold had gone into him. "Kael, can you hear me."
"Yes." The word was small and ragged and came out of him like something torn loose. "Yes. I hear you."
"The wraith."
"Gone." He lifted his head. There was snow in his hair and the shadow of the brand moved with his face, a slow dark pulse. "I do not know where. I do not know what I did. I do not want to know what I did."
She did not ask him to explain. She had felt it from her side of the working, the way the fragment had opened like a mouth under his hands, the way the brand had answered it. She had felt, too, the thing that had come up out of the hollow to meet him, and she had understood in her blood that it was not the only thing of its kind, that there were more of them listening, that the one which had fled had only fled because the other had been louder. She kept her hand on the back of his neck and did not tell him this. There would be time for it. There would have to be time for it.
"Can you stand?"
"I can try."
He stood. It took him two attempts and she took his weight on her shoulder without being asked. He was heavier than she had expected. He smelled of scorched cloth and old iron and something else beneath both, something that was only him, the salt and skin of a young man who had not slept in two days. She braced her feet in the snow and they leaned into each other for a moment like two stones set against a wall.
"Walk," she said. "Slowly."
They walked. The hollow gave them back to the slope without difficulty, and the slope gave them back to the tree line, and the trees gave them back to the path. Kael did not speak. Maren did not press him. The only sound was their breathing and the soft complaint of the snow under their boots, and once, far off in the wood, the crack of a branch that might have been a footfall and might have been nothing.
They came out onto the path at the place where she had first seen the lights of the hold, and Lord Aldric Duskmere was waiting for them there.
He was not alone. Two of his men stood a little behind him, their breath smoking in the still air, and the Spectral Warden stood at his right hand in the form of a tall grey figure whose edges did not quite meet the air around them. Aldric himself was bareheaded. His hair was the colour of old ash and his face was the face of a man who had not slept either, and the look he gave his son as they came up out of the trees was a look Maren could not read, though she had seen that look on other fathers and guessed at its weight.
Kael stopped. Maren stopped with him.
"You came," Kael said. His voice was steadier than it had been in the hollow, but only just. "I did not think you would come."
"I came." Aldric did not move from where he stood. "I was told you had left the house. I was told the direction you had taken. I was told a number of things, by a number of people, and none of them agreed with each other. I came because I chose to come, and because the Warden here insisted, and because the alternative was to sit in my own hall and listen for your name in every report that came up the road."
"Warden Vell," Maren said, low.
The Spectral Warden inclined its head. It did not speak. It had spoken enough, perhaps, for one night. Its presence beside Aldric was enough of a statement. Aldric Duskmere had not, so far as Maren knew, ever travelled with a Warden of the old compact at his shoulder. He did so now, and the sight of it told her everything she needed to know about what had changed at the hold since she had left it.
"You are hurt," Aldric said to his son. It was not a question.
"I am not."
"You are. I can see it. Do not lie to me in front of people I have chosen to bring with me."
Kael's jaw tightened. The brand on his shoulder gave a single slow flare of dark light and was still again, and Maren felt the fragment under his palm pulse in answer, a beat that was not a heartbeat but wanted to be one. She kept her hand on his arm. She did not know if he was aware of it. She suspected he was not, and that it was the reason he was still on his feet.
"There was a wraith in the hollow," Kael said. "More than one. The fragment woke, and the brand answered it, and I do not know what I did. I know the wraith is gone. I know I am standing here. The rest I will have to learn later."
"You will learn it from the Warden," Aldric said. "You will learn it from me. You will learn it, Kael, because the alternative is that it learns you, and I will not have my son eaten by a thing he pulled out of a frozen river."
"I did not pull it out."