He nodded. The firelight caught the planes of his face, the scars that mapped his history, the depth of his eyes.
"Then we stay."
Chapter 21
The morning broke clear and cold, the snow from the previous evening already crusting over with ice. Verity woke to find Targesh gone from the shelter, the fire banked low, and the sound of horses stamping in the lean-to.
She lay still for a moment, cataloguing sensations. Her muscles ached in places she had not known could ache. Her thighs felt like she had been stretched on a rack. Her lower back protested when she shifted, and her shoulders had developed a permanent hunch from gripping reins.
But she was warm. The bear-lined cloak had done its work, and the fire had held through the night, and she had slept better than she had any right to expect in a stone shelter halfway up a mountain.
She pushed herself upright and began the process of reassembling her layers.
Targesh ducked through the doorway as she was pulling on her second boot. He carried an armload of fresh snow packed into a leather bag.
"For water," he said, setting it near the fire to melt. "The stream froze overnight."
"How cold is it?"
"Cold enough that we should move while the sun is up." He crouched by the fire, feeding it fresh kindling. "The pass will be colder. But the trail is clear."
She finished with her boots and stood, testing her weight on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. The muscles screamed. She ignored them.
"I'm ready."
He looked at her, and whatever he saw in her face seemed to satisfy him, because he nodded and rose.
"Eat first. Then we ride."
The trail above Stonehaven was narrower than anything they had traveled the day before.
The horses picked their way along a ledge carved into the mountainside, the rock wall rising sheer on their left, the drop falling away on their right into a valley so far below that the trees looked like moss. Verity kept her eyes fixed on Targesh's back and tried not to think about the distance between her and the ground.
He rode ahead, but closer than he had the previous day. Close enough that she could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his head turned slightly at every sound. He seemed to be reading the mountain, scanning for patterns, for anomalies, for the small details that revealed larger truths.
"The stones," she said, pointing to a cairn they were passing. Three rocks stacked in a pyramid, the top one marked with an unfamiliar symbol.
"Patrol markers." He did not slow. "This one indicates safe passage. The symbol means the trail was checked within the last season."
"And if it weren't safe?"
"The top stone would be turned. Or removed entirely."
She filed this away. "What other markers are there?"
He glanced back at her. "Water sources. Shelter locations. Territorial boundaries. Danger warnings like unstable ground, predator territory, areas where rockfall is common."
"A language written in stone."
"The mountain does not care for paper."
They rode on. She asked about every marker they passed, and he answered, sometimes briefly, sometimes with stories attached. A boundary stone that had been placed after a dispute between clans three generations ago. A water marker that led to a spring sacred to the Mountain Clan, where warriors came to drink before battle. A warning cairn above a stretch of trail where an avalanche had killed four orcs in Targesh's grandfather's time.
The mountain was not empty. It was annotated.
The change came so gradually that she did not notice it at first.
The sky had been clear when they left Stonehaven. By mid-morning, thin clouds had begun to gather over the western peaks. By the time they stopped to water the horses at a frozen stream, the clouds had thickened and the wind had shifted direction.
