The names blurred together after a while, but she held onto them anyway.
When they had visited every marker, she returned to the center of the plateau. The boulders cast long shadows in the afternoon light, dark shapes that pooled like water across the snow.
"I want to leave something," she said.
Targesh watched her. He did not ask what or why. He simply waited.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out her brother's letter. It was folded small, creased from four years of carrying, the paper soft from the oil of her fingers. She had memorized every word years ago. She did not need the physical object anymore. She had been clinging to it as though the paper itself contained something she could not access any other way.
She unfolded it. Read it one more time, her eyes moving over the familiar loops of Corvin's handwriting.
Verity —
We made good time through the lower pass. The weather's held, which Sergeant Maren says means it will be terrible by the end of the week.
The mountains here are beautiful. You would love them. You would have questions about everything. The rocks, the snow, the plants that grow where nothing should grow. I keep thinking I should take notes for you, but you know me. I can never sit still long enough.
The twenty-third of Harvestmoon. Thornfield Pass. I'll write again when we're through.
— Corvin
She folded it again. Knelt in the snow beside the nearest boulder, one without markings, just a rock that happened to be where her brother might have stood.
She did not bury the letter. The ground was frozen too hard for that. Instead, she wedged it into a crack in the stone, pressing it deep, anchoring it against the wind.
"I don't know if you're here," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "I don't know if your bones are under this snow or if Valdara took them back and I'll never know what they did with them. But I'm here. I came. I wanted you to know that someone remembered."
The wind blew. The paper fluttered but held.
"I'm not going to keep looking," she said. "You've been gone for four years, and I've been holding onto you so tightly because letting go felt like losing you again."
She pressed her palm against the cold stone.
"But that's not how it works, is it? Holding on doesn't bring you back. It just keeps me from moving forward." Her voice cracked. "I have to move forward now. I have to learn to carry you differently. Not like a wound. Like a memory. Like something I can take with me instead of something that anchors me to the past."
The tears came then, the kind that shook her whole body and left her gasping for air. She knelt in the snow beside a rock that meant nothing and wept for her brother, for the years of not knowing, for the closure she would never have.
Targesh's arms came around her from behind. He did not try to stop the weeping. He did not offer words of comfort or platitudes about time or healing. He simply held her while she fell apart, his body a wall between her and the wind, his presence the only solid thing in a world that had dissolved into grief.
She wept until she was empty. Until the tears stopped, and all that remained was a hollow quiet that might have been peace or might have been just numbness.
Targesh lifted her. She did not protest; her legs would not have held her anyway. He carried her across the snow to where the horses waited, and settled her onto a flat rock near a shallow overhang that provided shelter from the wind.
"Rest," he said. "I will make camp."
She watched him move through the fading light, gathering wood from dead trees beyond the plateau's edge, building a fire. The flames caught quickly, throwing orange light across the snow, and she held her hands toward the warmth without really feeling it.
The sun set. The sky turned colors, orange and pink and purple bleeding into the deep blue of approaching night. The stars emerged one by one, sharp and clear in the mountain air, more stars than she had ever seen from Caelvorn.
Targesh sat beside her. They did not speak. There was nothing left to say, and the silence was not empty. It was full, weighted with everything they had shared over the past two days.
Eventually, she leaned against him. His arm came around her, pulling her close, and she felt the steady rhythm of his breathing, the heat of his body cutting through the cold.
"Thank you," she said.
He did not answer. He did not need to.
They slept on the plateau that night, wrapped in blankets near the fire, her smaller form fitted against the curve of his larger one. The stars wheeled overhead. She watched them until her eyes grew heavy, naming the constellations she knew and making up names for the ones she didn't.
