She didn't know how long she'd been sitting. The cold had seeped through her trousers, numbing her legs, but she couldn't make herself stand. The boulders rose around her like a cage, and the sky pressed down from above, and she was so tired. Tired of carrying this grief, tired of searching, tired of hoping for something that was never going to come.
He did not speak. He sat down beside her in the snow, close enough that she could feel his warmth, far enough that she did not feel crowded. His presence was solid, patient, immovable.
"I thought I would feel different," she said eventually. Her voice was hoarse from shouting. "Coming here. Seeing it. I thought... I don't know what I thought. That there would be some kind of..."
She trailed off.
"Closure," Targesh said.
She scoffed. "Yes. Closure. That ridiculous word people use when they want grief to end neatly." She pressed her palms against her eyes.
Targesh was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough.
"Three years into my time as warchief, there was a skirmish at Harrow's Gap. Fourteen warriors went out. Nine came back. The five we lost—" He paused, his jaw tightening. "We found two of the bodies. The other three were taken by the Valdaran forces." He said the wordtakenlike it tasted foul. "Displayed, we were told. As proof of victory."
Verity lowered her hands from her eyes.
"I sent emissaries. I negotiated. I offered prisoners in exchange. But Valdara wanted the propaganda more than they wanted their men back." His hand found hers, squeezing once before releasing. "I never found them. I have markers for them at Northwatch, carved with their names, placed in the memorial hall. But I do not know where their bones are."
"How did you—" Her voice cracked. "How do you bear it?"
"Badly, at first." He looked out across the plateau, his eyes distant. "I convinced myself that finding the bodies would fix something. I spent a year chasing leads, questioning prisoners, sending scouts into territory I had no business risking men for." His mouth twisted. "I did not find them. I found other things instead. More dead. More names for the list."
"What changed?"
"I stopped looking." He turned to face her. "Not because I wanted to. Because I had nothing left to look for. I had exhausted every possibility, and there was nothing. Just absence where there should have been an answer."
"And that was enough? To stop?"
"No." He shook his head slowly. "It was not enough. It will never be enough. But I learned, eventually, thatenoughis notwhat grief requires. Grief does not ask to be satisfied. It asks to be carried."
She stared at him. The wind gusted across the plateau, lifting snow into spirals that danced briefly and then fell.
"I have been carrying Corvin for four years," she said. "I am so tired."
"I know."
"I thought if I could just find—something. Some record, some marker, some place where I could stand and saythis is where he is—I thought that would make it easier. That the weight would finally lift."
"It does not lift." His voice was gentle in a way she had not heard before. "You simply grow strong enough to bear it."
She considered this. Considered the man beside her, who had been carrying the dead for nineteen years, who had carved his grief into the margins of histories rather than let the names be lost, who had walked her through a storm to bring her to this place.
"You did not have to come," she said. "You could have told me no. You could have said it was too foolish."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because you needed to come." He said it simply, as though it were obvious. "And because I would not let you come alone."
She leaned into him. His arm came around her, pulling her against his side, and she let herself be held. The cold pressed in from all sides, but where she touched him, there was warmth. There was solidity. There was a man who had stood in her corner without being asked, who had seen her grief and carried her toward it instead of away.
They stayed on the plateau as the afternoon waned.
Verity walked it again, slower this time, letting herself see it for what it was rather than what she had wanted it to be. The orc markers rose from the snow like monuments, each one carved with a name and a story she could not read. She stopped at each one, touched the stone, tried to imagine the life that had ended there.
Targesh walked with her. He translated when she asked, giving her the names of warriors she had never known and would never meet: Torunn, brother of Brenneth. Vashka, who had been three weeks from her bonding ceremony. Morrel, who had killed four humans before a spear took him in the back. Grenn, who had been sixteen years old and on his first patrol.
