Page 16 of Iron Beneath the Snow

It lingered in the space between them.

Vargan’s expression cooled.

“There is no door,” he said flatly. “There is only contamination.”

Eira held his gaze.

“And if it is not contamination?” she asked more quietly now. “If the mark is something more than Ironfang’s weapon?”

Even as she spoke, she understood the misstep.

“You will not indulge Ironfang superstition,” Vargan said. “Their rites are crude tools—nothing more.”

To him, the world resolved into leverage and territory, into bloodlines that could be directed, controlled, and corrected. If magic existed, it existed only as another instrument of power.

“Rest,” he said. “And do not speak of what you felt.”

He turned toward the corridor.

“Father.”

He paused, though he did not look back.

“If I am unfit under the White Law,” she asked carefully, “what am I fit for?”

Silence stretched between them, thin but deliberate.

“That depends,” he said at last, “on how useful you remain.”

The corridor swallowed him without echo.

Eira remained standing where she was for a long moment after he left, the word settling slowly inside her, cold and persistent, like frost forming along the inside of her ribs.

Useful.

When she finally lowered herself back onto the stone, the cold did not bite as sharply as before.

Her fingers drifted once more to the mark. It pulsed faintly beneath her touch, low and steady, not in response to her father or to the White Law, but to something that existed beyond both.

She closed her eyes and tried again to summon the memory of the man who had carved it there.

A black cloak.

Steady breathing.

Hands that had never trembled.

His face refused to take shape, as though the memory itself resisted clarity, dissolving each time she tried to hold it.

Yet one certainty remained.

He had known exactly what he was doing.

The mark warmed faintly beneath her palm.

And somewhere far beyond Frostvein’s walls, something answered.

The days that followed passed without explanation.