Chapter 1
Verity Dunmore stood at the base of the path leading up to Northwatch and thought, quite seriously, that she'd underestimated the scale of this.
She had read about it, of course. She had read everything the Royal Archive possessed on the Mountain Clan fortifications, which was admittedly not much but had included three diagrams, two conflicting accounts of construction methods, and one rather hysterical report from a Valdaran diplomat who had visited forty years ago and spent most of his pages complaining about the food.
None of it had prepared her for the reality of standing here, travel-worn and wind-chapped, looking up at walls that made the architecture of Caelvorn seem like a child's ambitious sketch.
The wind cut across the mountainside, finding every gap in her cloak. Her cheeks stung. Her fingers ached with cold. Reading about the cold of the Iron Wilds and standing in it were proving to be rather different experiences.
She pulled her cloak tighter and made a note in her small leather journal.
Scale of fortification significantly exceeds archival estimates. Recommend revision of Thornbury's diagrams. Possibly Thornbury was drunk.
Not that Verity had ever been drunk, but she was beginning to suspect that Thornbury's relationship with accuracy had been somewhat casual even when sober.
"You write a great deal," observed Grukash, the orc who had escorted her from the border crossing.
Grukash was not as tall as she had expected orcs to be, which meant he was merely enormous rather than incomprehensible. Maybe six and a half feet, broad through the chest and shoulders, with an improbably handsome face.
Perhaps that was why he had been assigned to work the border crossing. His features, while undeniably orcish, arranged themselves in ways that human eyes found less alarming. The tusks were modest, the brow less pronounced, the overall effect closer tolarge and intimidatingrather thanmonster from a nursery tale designed to frighten children into obedience.
Verity had noticed this within the first hour of their acquaintance and had immediately written it down, which Grukash had noticed her doing, which had led to a silence she had filled by explaining her theory about strategic deployment of aesthetically accessible personnel in diplomatic contexts.
He had stared at her. Then he had laughed and said, "You are a very strange human."
This was not the first time Verity had heard this observation. She had stopped taking offense somewhere around age twelve.
"I find that if I don't write things down immediately, I lose them," she said now, tucking the journal back into her pocket. "And then I have to rely on memory, which is a deeply unreliable narrator."
Grukash's head tilted slightly. "You do not trust your own mind?"
"I don't trust anyone's mind. Minds are very confident and very often wrong."
Grukash said nothing to this, just turned back to the path.
The path wound upward in a series of switchbacks that seemed designed to make siege engines weep with frustration. Verity walked beside the sturdy mountain pony that Grukash had brought with him. It was a shaggy, ill-tempered creature with a coat the color of dirty snow and an expression of personal offense at her existence. It pulled a small cart containing her trunk, which held everything essential for three months of archival work in orc territory.
Her colleagues at the Royal Archive had been divided on what "essential" meant in this context. Magister Holloway had pressed upon her a small knife "for protection," which Verity had accepted politely and immediately buried at the bottom of her trunk, confident she would slice off her own finger before successfully threatening anyone with it. Archivist Pennworth had contributed a phrase book of "common orcish expressions," which Verity had flipped through on the journey and found to consist primarily of terms for surrender and a surprisingly detailed vocabulary for describing different types of cheese.
And she had packed ink. A great deal of ink. Twelve bottles, carefully wrapped in wool batting. Quills, nibs, two spare journals, her good magnifying glass, the small brass ruler she had owned since her first year at the Archive, and a reference text on early border period diplomatic correspondence that she was reasonably certain no one would miss.
Also several changes of clothes, though she had given the matter significantly less thought than the ink situation.
"The warchief will receive you this evening," Grukash said as they rounded another switchback and the gates came into full view. "You will be shown to your quarters first. There is time to wash and eat."
"That's very civilized."
Grukash glanced at her sideways. "You expected otherwise?"
"I expected nothing," Verity said honestly. "Expectation requires data, and the Archive's data on orcish hospitality customs is approximately forty years out of date and written by a man who complained about being served mutton five times in a single report. I have chosen to arrive without assumptions."
This was not entirely true. She had one assumption, and it concerned the warchief himself.
The Archive possessed exactly one document that mentioned Targesh Ironhide by name, a military report written by a Valdaran captain. The man's prose had been clipped and professional throughout, except for one passage where the professionalism had cracked:
The orc warchief stood a full head taller than his largest warriors. I have faced men who wished to kill me. This one looked at me as though I were already dead and he was waiting for my body to realize it.
Verity had read that passage several times. She had constructed a mental image from it, knowing the image was almost certainly wrong but unable to stop her mind from building it anyway.
