"I am terrified."
"The two are not incompatible."
He turned his horse back toward the trail. She followed.
The valley below the ridge was gentler than the approach. Pine forests replaced bare stone, and the trail widened enough for two horses to ride abreast. Targesh slowed until she drew alongside him, their stirrups nearly touching.
"You have questions," he said.
She always had questions. The problem was choosing which ones to ask.
"How many times have you made this journey?"
"To Thornfield Pass specifically? Three times. To the high passes in general?" He considered. "More than I can count."
They rode in silence for a while. The forest thickened around them, pines giving way to darker evergreens whose branches interlocked overhead. The light dimmed.
"My brother was only twenty-four," Verity said.
Targesh did not respond. He did not need to. She could feel his attention like a weight.
"He was three years younger than me. He used to follow me around when we were children. Into the library, into the Archives when I started my apprenticeship. He hated books. Couldn't sit still long enough to read anything longer than a letter. But he followed me anyway because—" Her voice caught. She pressed on. "Because that was who he was. He wanted to be wherever I was."
"He joined the military?"
"When he was eighteen. I told him not to. I told him it was dangerous, that the border was unstable, that he would be risking his life for politics he did not understand." She laughed,the sound brittle. "He said I worried too much. He said he would be fine. He said he would write every week."
"Did he?"
"For the first two years. Then monthly. Then—" She swallowed. "His last letter arrived three days before the notice of his death."
The horses walked on. The forest breathed around them, the sound of wind through needles, the distant call of something that might have been a bird.
"I keep thinking about what you said. In your quarters, about the annotations." She forced her voice steady. "You said an unnamed death is still a death. That it should be marked."
"Yes."
"I have been carrying Corvin for four years. But I have been carrying him wrong. Like a wound. Like something to protect. Not like a memory. Not like a name worth marking."
"There is no wrong way to carry the dead." His voice was rough. "There is only the weight, and how long you have held it."
"The weight changes," she said. "That's what I didn't understand. I thought grief was supposed to get lighter. Everyone said it would get lighter. Time heals, they said. The sharpness fades." She shook her head. "I wake up some mornings and forget for a moment that he's gone, and then I remember, and it's like losing him again. Every time."
Targesh was quiet for a moment as the horses picked their way through a stretch of trail where roots had broken through the packed earth.
"Nineteen years ago," he said, "I became warchief because Gorath Mountainbreaker died in a raid I should have seen coming."
Verity turned to look at him. His face was in profile, the scars catching the dim forest light.
"He was not my father. He was not my kin. But he trained me from the time I could hold a blade." His jaw tightened. "When he fell, I was three ridges away, dealing with a distraction that had been engineered to draw me from his side."
"You couldn't have known."
"No. I could not have known." He said it like a fact he had recited to himself a thousand times. "But knowing that changes nothing. The weight does not care whether you earned it. It settles where it settles."
The trail opened into a small clearing. Sunlight broke through the canopy in scattered shafts, illuminating patches of moss and stone. Targesh reined his horse to a stop.
"We rest here. Water the horses."
