Raven Steele counted the guards on the citadel wall for the ninth night in a row, and for the ninth night she counted alone except for the woman crouched beside her. Three years ago the warlord's raiders had taken her sister to the mines. Raven had been moving ever since, from camp to camp, buying names, testing loyalties, looking for anyone who would help her pull the tyrant down. She had one recruit. She needed a thousand. Below them, the iron and brass towers of the fortress breathed steam into the cold, and every plume said the same thing: come alone and you die. "You've asked six villages this month," the woman said. "Six no's." Raven didn't answer. She was watching the far ridge, where a pale shape moved against the black rock. Too big for a horse. Too quiet for a machine. She had heard the stories the caravan drivers told about a beast that lived past the salt flats, a beast the warlord's hunters had chased for a year and never brought down. Raven had marked it as rumor. The shape on the ridge lowered its head and looked straight at her. She went down the slope before her recruit could stop her. Halfway across the flat she saw it clearly: a frost dragon, scales the color of river ice, wings folded, one foreleg planted on something metal and half-buried in the sand. Raven read the animal the way she read men. No crouch. No bared teeth. It was waiting. She stepped closer and saw what its claw held down — a suit of armor, silver and gold, purple stones set into the joints, faint blue script glowing along the plates. The dragon lifted its foot. It wanted her to take the armor. It had been waiting, maybe for weeks, for someone stupid enough to come down the slope alone. Raven knelt in the sand and put her hand on the breastplate. The runes warmed under her palm. Behind her, her recruit came skidding down the rocks, sword drawn, and stopped when she saw the dragon's yellow eye tracking her without anger. "We can't take him," Raven said, meaning the warlord, meaning the citadel, meaning every no she had swallowed this month. "Not with numbers." She stood, and the armor's plates shifted toward her as if they had been measured for her shoulders a long time ago. The dragon lowered its head to the height of a saddle. Raven looked at her one ally and did not smile. "We don't need an army yet," she said. "We need to be seen." The mines were four days east. She meant to ride in wearing light.

Raven rode east for three days in the silver armor, and on the fourth morning she stopped a half-mile from the mines. The pit lay open in the rock like a mouth. Steam rose from vents around its rim. Guards moved on the scaffolds, but she could not count them from here, and she could not see the tunnels below. Her ally reined in beside her. "You still mean to ride down there?" Raven watched a shift change she did not understand. She did not know when the next one came, or which gate the workers used, or where they kept her sister. Bright armor or not, blind was still blind. She turned the horse north. There was a forge town two ridges over, built to feed the mines. Every drill bit and chain link in the pit came from its furnaces. Raven had heard a name whispered by caravan drivers who bought steel there. A blindfolded woman who ran a furnace alone. Workers who left her floor said the same thing twice: she knew every gate in the warlord's holdings because she had shod the hinges herself. Raven left the horse and the armor with her ally outside the town. She went in on foot, in a dust cloak, with coin. The furnace hall stood at the low end of the street. Heat pushed out the open door in a wall. Inside, a pale woman in black plate stood at the anvil, a strip of dark cloth tied across her eyes. She did not turn when Raven stepped in. "Shut the door," she said. "You are letting the cold in." Raven shut it. She set three coins on the bench and said what she wanted. Guard rotations at the mines. Tunnel maps. The cell block where the long-term workers slept. The woman lifted the hammer and struck once. Sparks jumped. "You are wearing someone else's shape," she said. "Under the cloak. I can hear the runes." Raven did not answer. The woman set the hammer down. "Reva Nox does not sell the warlord's doors for coin." "Then what do you sell them for?" "A face I have not met." Reva turned her blindfold toward Raven. "Take the cloak off. I do not need eyes to read a person. I need a voice that does not lie." Raven dropped the cloak. The runes on the breastplate warmed in the forge light. She told Reva about her sister. She told her about six villages that said no. She did not soften any of it. Reva listened without moving. When Raven finished, Reva walked to a shelf and pulled down a rolled hide. "Three gates," she said. "Two shifts. One tunnel the overseers do not watch, because it floods." She pressed the roll into Raven's hand. "Bring her out before the next full moon. After that, the flooded tunnel closes for the season."

Raven rode back to the ridge above the mines with the map rolled in her belt and eleven days left before the full moon. Her ally waited with the horse and the silver armor. Raven spread the hide on a flat stone and traced the flooded tunnel with her thumb. Two people could enter. Two people could not fight their way out with a third who had been three years underground. She needed hands, and every village within a week's ride had already turned her down. Her ally spoke first. "There is one place left you have not tried." She pointed east, past the salt flats, toward a low black shape on the horizon. "The old fortress. The one the warlord's men will not go near." Raven had seen the shape before and ridden around it. A stone keep bristling with pipes and gearwork, built by a people no one remembered. Workers in the forge town said the doors opened for no one. Raven looked at the map, then at the moon already thin in the afternoon sky. She mounted. They reached the keep at dusk. The gates stood shut, ringed in brass and cold iron. Raven put her gauntlet on the door. The runes on her breastplate lit. Something inside the wall answered them, and the doors ground open on their own hinges. The hall beyond was empty. At the far end, set into the stone, hung a ring of metal the size of a wagon wheel, its center full of turning light. Gears floated around it, unattached to anything. A voice came from above. "You wear a key you do not understand." Raven looked up. A dragon lay along a beam in the rafters, its scales the color of a night sky, its eyes pale. It did not move to strike. "The ring behind me opens onto other hours," it said. "Men once used it to send soldiers where soldiers were needed. The soldiers are still there. They have been waiting." Raven understood the offer and the price at once. She could bring back fighters from a war the world had forgotten, and she would owe the thing in the rafters whatever it asked later. Her ally stood at her shoulder, silent, waiting for the call. Raven thought of her sister on a cot in the dark, and the moon growing thinner every night. She walked to the ring. She pressed her gauntlet against the frame. The light inside pulled taut, then opened. Figures stepped through, armored, blinking, twelve of them, then twenty. They lowered their weapons when they saw the runes on her chest. Raven turned to her ally. "We ride tonight." Behind her, the dragon settled deeper into the beam and closed its eyes, as if a debt had been written down and set aside. She had her hands. She did not yet know what she had promised for them.