Kestrel Thawbrook rode into the valley before dawn with the crown of Varilia on her mind and a price on her head. The usurper had offered coin for her body a year ago, on the same night his men killed her father, her mother, and the two servants who could have run and did not. She had grown into her fighting leathers since then. She had trained under someone whose name she would not say aloud, not even to herself in the dark. She had once stood close enough to the usurper to smell the wine on his breath, one hand on her sword the whole time, and she had walked away because one blade against a hall of guards was not a plan. She needed allies. She could not ride into the fortress alone. From the ridge she could see the citadel squatting on the plain, towers bristling, gates shut, banners of the wrong house hung over her father's stone. Below her, at the treeline, a plain wooden stable waited with its shutters closed. A man inside had sent word that he would meet her. He had served her father once. He might still. He might also sell her for the bounty and sleep well after. She had thought about how to know the difference. Before she left camp, she had folded a small square of forest green cloth into her glove. Her mother had woven that pattern into every banner in the hall, a knot that closed on itself and could not be undone. Anyone who had truly served the house would know it on sight. Anyone who did not would only see a scrap of cloth. She tied the black stallion behind the stable and went in through the side door with her sword drawn. The man was already there, sitting on a hay bale, hands open on his knees. He was older than she remembered, thinner. He looked at her face and did not stand. She dropped the green square on the boards between them. He picked it up. He turned it in his fingers, found the knot, and held it against his chest without a word. Then he reached into his coat and drew out a strip of the same green cloth, older, stained brown at one edge, and laid it beside hers. "I kept mine," he said. "There are eleven of us left. We have been waiting for someone to ask." He named a place three days' ride north where the others were hidden, and a suit of black armor her father had ordered before he died, still crated, still hers. Kestrel sheathed her sword. She had an ally, and a road, and a name she could not yet trust with the whole truth. She swung back onto the stallion before full light and rode north, because eleven men waiting in a barn were still eleven men who could be bought, and she meant to reach them before the coin did.

By the second day the stallion was finished. Kestrel felt it in the way his shoulders shook on the flat ground, in the foam that would not clear from his mouth. She had ridden him too hard and she knew it. North of her the country opened into low grass and bare stone, no cover for a mile in any direction. If he went down out there, she went down with him. She kept one hand on his neck and the other near the ruby-hilted saber at her hip. She would not leave the saber. Her father had carried it. She would carry it into the citadel or she would die with it. She saw the standing stone before she saw the rider. It rose from the grass alone, moss on its north face, old marks cut deep into the granite. She used it for cover and swung down. The stallion's legs shook. She pressed her forehead to his and made herself breathe. Then she heard hooves behind her, steady, unhurried, one horse. Gareth Blackwood came around the stone with his sword already sheathed. He had followed her from the stable. She had known he would. He had served her for six years and she had never once ordered him to stop. He slid down from a fresh bay gelding and looked at the stallion, then at her. "Take mine," he said. "I'll walk yours until he can rest." He handed her the reins. Then he pulled a broken shaft from his saddlebag and dropped it in the grass at her feet. A wooden spear, notched grip, a feather tied near the point. "Found three of these on the road behind us. Stuck upright. His hunters mark their patrols this way. They know you rode north." He drew a folded paper from inside his jerkin. "And this was in the stable rafters after you left. A courier's order. They mean to kill you before you reach the citadel. Not take you. Kill you." She read it twice. The seal was the usurper's. The route was hers. She looked up at Gareth. His face was the same face she had known for years, and something in it had changed, or she was only now willing to see it. "Why did you come after me," she said. "Because I love you," he said. "I have for a long time. I would put myself between you and any blade they send. That is all. You don't have to answer." He picked up the stallion's reins and started walking. Kestrel mounted the bay. The horse was fresh under her. The road north was clear for now, and she had a name for what was hunting her, and a man walking beside her who had told her the truth. She turned the bay toward the citadel and rode.