The guest house sat at the edge of everything, where the village's last proper houses gave way to scrubland and the mountains' perpetual fog. It was a small place, stone walls and a thatched roof, a door that stuck in wet weather. The villagers said I could stay here for the week, until I was strong enough to leave.
The hearth was cold when I pushed inside. Of course it was. I hadn’t had time to bank the fire. Bram was the priority. And of course, no one had lit the fire for me while I was gone.
The cottage felt like a held breath. Waiting. Empty.
I found flint and tinder by touch in the darkness, sparked a fire more from habit than desire. The flames caught slowly, illuminating the space: a bed with a single blanket, a table with one chair, herbs drying in the rafters. A kettle. A few old books, their spines cracked from rereading.
No paintings on the walls. No flowers in vases. Nothing soft. Nothing that said someone lived here.
I ate the rest of the bread standing at the window, watching the lights of Thornhallow flicker through the mist. Warm yellow squares in the darkness. Families gathering for supper. Mothers tucking children into bed. Husbands and wives reaching for each other in the firelight.
The blacksmith was probably home by now, his son safe in the bed where he should have been all along. Dessa would be making something warm for them to eat. They'd stay up late, I imagined, just watching Bram breathe. Touching him to make sure he was real.
I wondered what it would feel like.
To be held like that. To have someone's hands gentle on my hair. To matter to someone not because of what I could do for them, but just because I existed.
The thought was dangerous. I knew that. Wanting things you couldn't have—that was how wound-walkers truly burned out. Not from the pain itself, but from the loneliness of carrying it alone.
I put the thought away in the same place I kept all the others. The drawer in my mind where impossible things went to be forgotten.
The fire crackled. The mist pressed against the window like something trying to get in.
I went to bed alone.
Thewinterrootscameup reluctantly, like they'd rather stay buried than face whatever was coming. I knew the feeling. Three days since Bram's healing, and my bones still ached with echoes of his fever, a lingering soreness that reminded me I wasn't as young as I used to be. Twenty-seven wasn't old. But wound-walkers aged differently than other people.
The guest-house’s garden was small and practical—turnips, carrots, the hardy vegetables that survived Thornhallow's perpetual damp. I’d noticed the roots yesterday, and thought I’d test my strength by pulling them up. I was elbow-deep in cold dirt, prying loose a particularly stubborn parsnip, when the shadow passed overhead.
I looked up.
The sun had broken through the mist for once, weak but present, and against that pale light something massive was descending. Wings like ship sails. Scales that caught the sunlight and threw it back as molten bronze, liquid gold, living flame.
A dragon.
For one impossible moment, I just stared. Dragons were real—everyone knew that—but they kept to their islands, their courts, their ancient politics. No dragon had come to the Eastern Reaches in my lifetime. In my grandmother's lifetime. They were stories. Legends.
This one was neither.
The screams started before it landed.
I dropped the parsnip and ran.
Not away. Toward. The instinct was so bone-deep I didn't even think about it—where there was chaos, there would be wounded. Where there was fear, someone would need me. It never occurred to me to hide.
The village square was in pandemonium when I arrived. Chickens scattered everywhere. A cart had overturned insomeone's panic, spilling apples across the cobblestones. The villagers had pressed themselves against the buildings, some clutching children, some clutching weapons, all of them staring at the impossible creature that had landed in their midst.
The dragon was smaller than I'd expected—still massive, still terrifying, but not the mountain-sized beast of legend. Its scales rippled like hammered copper, and its eyes . . . its eyes held intelligence. Amusement, even.
A woman was climbing down from its back.
She moved with the ease of someone who'd done this a hundred times before, finding footholds in the dragon's scales, swinging down to land lightly on the cobblestones. Dark hair tumbled past her shoulders, tangled from the wind. Her clothes were fine—traveling leathers, embroidered with subtle flame patterns—but she wore them like someone who'd grown up in rougher circumstances. And her skin . . .
Golden marks traced her arms, her throat, her cheeks. They moved. Flickered. Like living flame dancing just beneath the surface.
She turned to face the crowd, and her eyes swept the terrified villagers with something that might have been sympathy.
"I'm looking for the wound-walker called Lena," she announced. Her voice carried without effort, clear and commanding. "We need her help."
