She looked at the boulder. The patterns were Orcish script, angular and dense, covering the rock's surface from base to crown. At the top, carved larger than the rest, a single word—a name, she assumed.
"Torunn," Targesh said. "Brenneth's brother. He fell here, defending the ravine so that others could retreat."
She stood at the stone, looking at the name she couldn't read, and felt her chest tighten. "How many?"
"Seventeen orc dead. The stones—" He looked across the plateau. "There are more. Scattered where they fell."
"And the humans?"
She knew the answer before he spoke. She had known it since Brenneth told her in the tannery.
"The Valdaran dead were retrieved by their own forces. What they could carry, they took. The rest—" He paused. "The rest were buried where they lay."
"There are no markers."
"No."
She walked the plateau.
Not systematically, not with the careful grid pattern she would have used in an archive. She walked because she could not stand still, because moving was the only thing keeping her upright, because if she stopped she would have to feel what was rising in her chest and she was not ready.
The pass spread around her, empty and vast. The wind had picked up slightly, a cold breath that carried the scent of snow and pine and distance. The sun was fully risen now, but it gave no warmth. Just light, harsh and clear, illuminating every detail of the landscape.
No names. No markers. The human dead had been buried without ceremony, their bodies committed to the mountain with nothing to say who they were or why they had been here. If Corvin's body was somewhere beneath this snow, there was nothing to distinguish his grave from any other patch of ground.
She had come looking for something to hold. A date carved in stone. A name she could trace with her fingers. A place to stand and sayhere, this is where he is.
The mountain had given her silence.
She stopped walking. She had reached the center of the plateau, near the cluster of boulders where the Valdaran forces had made their stand. The rocks were massive, taller than her, arranged by ancient chance into a formation that had probably seemed defensible to the soldiers who had crouched behind them.
It had not been enough.
She pressed her palm against the cold stone. Beneath her glove, the rock was rough and unyielding, nothing like the smooth paper of archives, nothing like the documents she had spent her life touching and preserving and cataloguing. This was a different kind of record. One that kept no names.
"Corvin." Her voice came out cracked and barely audible. "I'm here."
The wind answered. Nothing else.
She said his name again, louder this time. Then again, shouting it into the empty air, her voice bouncing off the rocks and fading into nothing. She shouted until her throat was raw, until the name stopped sounding like a name and became just ameaningless sound, absorbed by the mountain that did not care who she was or why she had come.
Then she stopped shouting, and the silence rushed back in, and she understood.
There was nothing to find.
Corvin was gone.
She could stand here for a hundred years and she would never find a document that told her where he lay.
She could dig through every foot of snow and she would never find the specific handful of bones that had once been her brother.
This was it. This was all she would ever have: a cold plateau, a field of orc markers, and the absolute absence of the answer she had traveled a thousand miles to find.
She sat down in the snow.
Chapter 23
Targesh found her there.
