Rebecka Evertrue stood at the wide window and counted six raiders on the ridge. Six meant a scouting line. A scouting line meant a bigger group behind it. The star-forged quiver she needed was three days' ride north, buried in a dead pilot's cache, and every hour she wasted here made the trail colder. Every hour she left made the ridge closer. She pressed her palm to the glass. Beyond it, the homestead's cultivated beds glowed soft green, herbs and strange fruit stacked in sleek trays down the outer walls. Her mother was inside, sorting seed. Her sister was in the loft. If Rebecka rode out tonight, the raiders would be over the fence by dawn. Boots on the floor behind her. Marcus Valorheart set his pack down without a word. He was the warrior who had put himself between her and a blade a year ago and never left since. His potion belt clinked as he crossed to the apothecary shelf and started pulling stoppered bottles down. "You saw them," she said. "Six on the ridge. More in the trees." He lined four potions on the counter. Blue. Green. Two the color of old blood. "Go north. I'll hold the house." "Marcus." "It's not a debate." "They'll send twenty. You have one set of hands." He looked up. His voice softened one notch. "I have wards. I have time to lay them if you leave now." He tapped the blue bottle. "And I have this." She knew what he wouldn't say. He knew the curse that leveled city blocks. He had sworn never to cast it. She had made him swear it twice. A small weight pressed against her boot. The grey tomcat in the patched cape sat at her ankle, tail curled, wizard hat tipped forward. Behind him, the tiny black and white kitten padded out from under the shelf, paws already glowing faint white. The healer. The two of them had adopted the homestead months ago and never left. "They'll stay with him," Rebecka said. It was not a question. The cheese-caped cat blinked once, slow. The kitten purred, and the sound settled something low in her chest. If Marcus took a wound, the kitten could keep him breathing. If the wards cracked, the tom knew tricks she still didn't understand. She pulled her bow off the hook. Three arrows left in the quiver at her hip. Ordinary shafts. The star-forged ones were what she was riding for. At the door she stopped. "If it goes bad—" "It won't." "If it does. You don't cast it. You retreat to the cellar and you wait for me." He didn't answer. That was the answer. She stepped out into the cold. Behind her, Marcus began to chalk the first ward across the threshold. Ahead, the ridge waited, and past it, three days of open ground between her and the arrows that could end this for good.

Rebecka rode north through low scrub until the homestead was a dark smudge behind her. She meant to put twenty miles between her and the ridge before she slept. Two miles in, her bow hummed against her back. A soft chime, then a warmer note. Something living was following her. She pulled up behind a stand of dry brush and turned in the saddle. The bow's grip warmed under her palm and painted a shape in her mind: one man, on foot, half a mile back, tracking her prints. A scout from the raider band. If he read her line north and rode back to report it, the war party would know exactly where she had gone and that the homestead was thinner by one bow. She could not outrun a man on foot who knew her heading. She had to end him here. Rebecka tied the horse in a wash and doubled back on foot. She moved wide, cut his trail, and came in behind him. He was crouched at her hoofprints, reading depth. Young. A short rifle on his back. A signal horn on his belt. She drew. The bow warmed, then went hot in her hand. The alert. He was close enough to die. She hated the small clean certainty of it. She hated that the weapon was sure before she was. She held the draw until her arm shook. Three days north. A mother and a sister behind her. A horn on his belt that would call twenty riders down on a house held by one man and two cats. She let the arrow go. He dropped without a sound. The bow cooled. She stood over him and made herself look. Then she took the horn off his belt and crushed it under her heel. She cut the strap of his rifle and buried it in the wash. She dragged him into the brush and covered him with stones. Back in the saddle, she pushed the horse harder. She had bought silence, but not much. When he failed to report in, the war party would know something had gone wrong on this line. They would move sooner, not later. She had traded her hidden trail for their hurried march. She rode until the stars turned. Somewhere behind her, in the loft above the apothecary shelf, her daughter would be curled in the floating hammock with the great violet-black jumping spider coiled at her feet, dreaming out past her body the way she did. The grey tabby with the jeweled collar would be walking the wards with the cheese-caped tom, ears up. Rebecka fixed that picture in her head and used it like a compass. Two days to the cache now, not three, if she did not sleep. She leaned forward and asked the horse for more.

By dawn Rebecka reached the edge of her old maps. The trail she knew ended at a split creek. Past that, the land climbed into three passes she had never crossed. One was right. Two were wrong. A wrong pass meant a day lost circling back, and she did not have a day. She dismounted and crouched by the creek. She pulled her folded map out and laid a stone on each corner. The ink stopped where the creek forked. Beyond it, the paper was blank. Her brother had meant to walk this country with her the summer he turned eighteen. He never got the chance. The bow warmed against her back. Not the killing heat. A softer pulse, the reading tone. Something living, close, watching. She stood slow and turned. A small round door had opened in the side of a mossy mound she had taken for a boulder. Above it, glowing mushroom caps she had missed in the dark. Lanterns strung on vines. A whole cluster of stalk-houses tucked into the hillside, breathing light. A fae village. Her mother had told her these people traded in true directions, if you had something they wanted. A small figure stepped out onto a bridge of woven root. She was no taller than Rebecka's hip, dressed in petal cloth, and she did not smile. "You are off your map, hunter," the fae said. "And in a hurry." "North pass," Rebecka said. "Which of the three carries a horse through in a day." "The middle. The left drops you in a bog. The right ends at a slide." The fae tilted her head. "That answer has a price." Rebecka's hand went to her belt. Coin. A knife. She had little to spare and no time to haggle. "Name it." "The rug under your saddle." Rebecka blinked. The woven cloth had been her daughter's gift, pressed into her hands the night she left. Star patterns. Long tassels. Ninka had said it would keep the cold off her at night. "It is my daughter's," Rebecka said. "Then she chose well. It is a made thing, full of her wanting you home. We can use that." The fae waited. "The middle pass, hunter. Or guess." Rebecka thought of Marcus at the homestead, potions on his belt, wards drawn thin. She thought of a curse he had sworn never to cast and might cast anyway if she was late. She untied the rug and folded it and laid it on the bridge. "Middle pass," the fae said. "Ride the ridge on the south side. Do not cross the stream until you see a white stone." Rebecka mounted and rode. By afternoon she was on the ridge, above a bog on her left and a slide on her right, moving fast on ground she had never seen. She had bought the day. She had spent her daughter's gift to do it, and the cache was still one hard push ahead.

Rebecka came off the ridge at dusk and knew before she dismounted that her horse was done. His head hung low. His flanks shook. When she led him to the stream he drank a swallow and stopped. She pressed her hand to his neck and felt the heat under the hide. One more hard mile would kill him, and one more hard mile was not enough. She still had a full day's ride north to the cache, and the raiders were marching. She unsaddled him by a stand of pines and rubbed him down with a fold of her cloak. Her hands worked while her mind ran the numbers. Walk, and she lost two days. Ride him, and he foundered in an hour. Either way she was late. Either way Marcus would be alone at the wards when the raiders came, and he would break his oath to save her mother, her sister, her daughter. She sat against a tree and pulled a bundle from her pack. Ninka had tucked it in the bottom the night she left. Rebecka had not opened it until now. Inside was a folded silk with a pinch of dust, a small carved token, and a scrap of paper in her daughter's round writing. *Say my name three times and lie down. I'll come.* Rebecka almost laughed. Her daughter's psychic tricks had been a game at the kitchen table. Guessing cards. Finding lost spoons. She had never asked the girl to reach this far. But Ninka had known. Ninka always knew. She cleared a patch of needles and lay back. She said the name three times. The dust warmed in her palm. The air above her folded. A hammock shape hung between two pines that had held nothing a moment before, woven of rope and tassels and a light that was not firelight. On the pillows sat her daughter, cross-legged, barefoot, flowers still in her hair. Beside her crouched a spider the size of a dog, black and violet, eight eyes steady on Rebecka. "Mama," Ninka said. "You're breaking your horse." "I know." "I brought you one that won't break." Ninka lifted her hand. Between the trees, a white mare stepped out of nothing. Her mane was braided with beads. Her coat threw faint color, like oil on water. "She's borrowed. She runs on the between-roads. A day for you is an hour for her." Rebecka stood. "You can do this?" "The spider holds the door. I hold her." Ninka's smile wavered. "Go fast, Mama. The cats are pacing. Marcus is counting bottles." Rebecka kissed her daughter's forehead through the strange, cold air of the hammock. She swung her saddle onto the mare. The mare took the weight like nothing. She left her spent horse tied loose by the stream with grain from her pack. Then she rode north on a road no map had ever shown her, and the trees blurred, and the night ran under the mare's hooves like water.

The white mare came off the between-roads at dawn and stopped at the edge of a birch wood. Rebecka slid down. Her legs shook. A day of ground lay behind her in an hour. Ahead, somewhere in these trees, was the cache her father had told her about once, before he died. He had never drawn her a map. He had said the quiver would find her when she came close enough. She did not know where to dig. She had ridden north on faith and a story. Now she stood in a wood full of birches that all looked the same, and the raiders were marching, and she had hours, not days. A crow dropped through the branches and landed on a low limb. Its feathers held a pattern like frost on glass, and its eyes were pale blue. She had raised it from a chick. She had left it at the homestead. Now it turned its head and clicked its beak at her. "He sent you," she said. The crow opened its beak. Marcus's voice came out of it, thin but his. "Rebecka. If you can hear me, listen. I found your father's book behind the loose stone in the hearth. There's a page for the cache. Three birches from a split rock. North face. Dig at the roots." She turned in place. Split rock. She saw it then, a granite shoulder cracked down the middle, twenty paces off. Three birches stood past it, leaning together. The crow spoke again. "Raiders are at the outer wards. I have the potions set. The cats are on the roof." A pause. His voice went flat, the way it did when a thing was decided. "I will hold. Do not turn back." "Marcus—" "Do not turn back." The crow shut its beak. She ran to the birches and knelt at the north roots. She dug with her knife and her hands. The dirt gave easily, as if it had been waiting. Six inches down her blade struck oiled cloth. She pulled the bundle free. The wrapping fell open in her lap. Inside lay a quiver of dark metal, and inside the quiver, arrows that hummed against her palm like a struck wire. Her bow, slung on her back, warmed between her shoulders. It knew. She closed her eyes. She had it. After three days and a killed scout and her daughter's rug traded away and a horse left dying by a stream, she had it. Then the crow spoke once more, quieter. "The east ward is down. Ride." Rebecka strapped the quiver to her back. She swung onto the white mare. The wood blurred. She rode south now, toward the smoke she could not yet see, with the weapon that could end any threat lying across her shoulders and no promise it would reach home in time.

The white mare broke from the between-roads at the ridge above the homestead, and Rebecka saw smoke. The glowing garden beds along the sleek walls still burned green and pink under the haze. Two ward crystals on the east wall had gone dark. Three still held. Between the wards and the trees, raiders swarmed the yard. She counted twelve on foot and one on a mount. Marcus stood at the door with a blade in one hand and a potion in the other. She slid off the mare and dropped to one knee at the ridge. She pulled an arrow from the star-forged quiver. It hummed against her fingers. Her bow warmed. A pale line traced through her vision and lit each raider in turn, then flickered to Marcus, then to a shape in the doorway behind him she knew was her mother. The bow marked them all. Kill shot. Kill shot. Kill shot. It did not tell her which arrow was meant for which body. She had never loosed one of these. Her father had said the arrows chose. She did not know what that meant with Marcus twenty paces from a raider's back. She drew and did not release. Her hands shook. If the arrow chose wrong, she would put it through him. Through her mother in the doorway. Through the small shape she now saw crouched behind her mother's skirts. Ninka. She lowered the bow. She pulled a single arrow from the quiver and held it flat on her palm. "Show me," she whispered. The arrow turned. Slow at first, then sure. The point swung past Marcus, past the doorway, past her mother, and settled on the mounted raider at the gate. It hummed once, hard. She understood. The arrows knew enemy from kin. The bow only warned. The arrow chose. She nocked it and drew and let go. The arrow crossed the yard in a line of white and took the rider through the chest. He fell without sound. She drew again. The next arrow twisted in the air mid-flight and struck a raider climbing the wall. The third bent around Marcus's shoulder and buried itself in the man behind him. Marcus turned, saw her on the ridge, and shouted something she could not hear. He threw a potion at his feet. A ring of light rose around the door. Her mother pulled Ninka inside. Rebecka emptied half the quiver in under a minute. The yard went quiet. Six raiders broke and ran for the trees. She did not chase them. Her hands were shaking too hard to nock another arrow. She walked the mare down the slope. Marcus met her at the broken gate. He touched her face once, checking her for wounds, then looked past her at the tree line. "They'll come back with more," he said. "And they know the wards are half down."

Marcus counted the bodies in the yard while Rebecka counted the dark crystals on the walls. Five out of eight wards were gone. The three that still held gave off a thin blue light, but the seams between them flickered. She could see the gaps from where she stood. Any raider with a spear could see them too. "How long until they come back?" she asked. "By dark," Marcus said. "Maybe sooner. I heard a horn in the trees before you arrived." She walked the wall with him. He had two potions left on his belt and a shallow cut above his eye. She had eleven arrows in the quiver. Eleven arrows and a fence with holes in it. Inside the house, her mother was already moving furniture. Katia had pushed the long table against the door and was stacking clay jars on the sill. Ninka sat cross-legged on the floor with a woven rug spread out in front of her. The rug's tassels lifted on their own, as if in a wind that was not there. "The wards are done," Rebecka said. "We can't rebuild them before nightfall." Katia set down a jar. "Then don't rebuild them. Replace them." "With what?" "With her." Katia nodded at Ninka. Rebecka looked at her daughter. Ninka's palms were flat on the rug. The luminous patterns under her hands were brightening. "She's ten," Rebecka said. "She opened a road for you across three days of country," Katia said. "You know what she is. Stop pretending you don't." Rebecka's throat closed. She had spent years teaching Ninka small games. Card tricks. Guessing. She had not wanted this. Ninka looked up. "Mom. I can hold a halo around the house. Grandma showed me how in the cellar while you were gone." "Show me," Rebecka said. Ninka closed her eyes. The rug rose two inches off the floor. A ring of light opened above it, small at first, then wider, layered rings inside rings, blue and violet, humming like the arrows. A shield. Not a ward crystal. Something older. Rebecka knelt and put her hand through the light. It did not burn. It pushed back. "How long can you hold it?" she asked. "A night. Maybe two. If I don't sleep." Marcus stepped into the doorway. He looked at the halo. He looked at Rebecka. He did not speak. Rebecka took her daughter's face in her hands. "You hold it from inside. I'll stand outside with the bow. Your grandmother stays with you. Marcus watches the gate." Ninka nodded. Rebecka went out to the broken yard. The halo rose behind her, a dome of soft light covering the house where the wards had been. It was smaller than the old shield. It did not reach the outbuildings or the garden. It covered her family and nothing else. A horn sounded in the trees. Closer now. She nocked an arrow.

Rebecka stood in the broken yard with the halo humming behind her. Marcus watched the gate. The raiders came out of the treeline at dusk, more than before, and one of them walked ahead of the others with no weapon in his hands. He wore a gray hood and held his palm out flat, like a man feeling for heat. "Reader," Marcus said. He kept his voice low. "He's tracking the shield." Rebecka lifted the bow. The bowstring lit along its length. The bow whispered the man's makeup into her hand: bone, blood, and a thread of something that hummed like her arrows. A mage. It marked his location in a soft pulse against her palm. He was not yet close enough to die. The bow did not warn her. She was glad of that, and she hated that she was glad. The hooded man kept walking. He pointed at the dome, then past it, then straight at the house. His finger moved like a needle finding north. He was pointing at Ninka. Rebecka felt her stomach drop. If he could feel Ninka through the shield, the raiders would drive every spear at that one wall. "Take the shot," Marcus said. "He's out of range." "Then move." She ran along the broken fence, low, keeping the outbuildings between herself and the raider line. The glowing garden beds along the homestead wall lit her boots as she passed. She stopped behind the last planter and drew. The bow pulsed once. In range. It did not tell her he would die. It told her he could. She let the arrow go. The humming arrow found the hooded man's throat. He dropped without a sound. The raiders behind him shouted and lifted shields. An arrow answered from their line and cracked against the planter beside her head. Marcus was already moving. He threw a potion at the gate. Blue smoke bloomed and held the first two raiders back, coughing. Rebecka nocked again and put an arrow through the shoulder of a man climbing the fence. He fell inside the yard. The bow marked the rest for her, one after another, cool pulses against her palm. Then the raiders pulled back. They dragged the hooded body with them. In a breath, the treeline was empty again. Rebecka lowered the bow. Her hands shook. Marcus reached her. "You got the reader." "They know he found her before he died," she said. "They know exactly which wall to hit now." Behind them, the halo flickered. Once. Twice. Then it steadied, brighter than before, as if Ninka had heard and pushed harder. Rebecka turned and looked at the small dome over her house. Her ten-year-old daughter was holding a wall the raiders now had a map to. She counted her arrows. Nine left.

Rebecka crouched behind the last planter with nine arrows and a treeline she could not see through. The raiders had pulled back into the pines. She knew they were massing again. She could not see where. When they came, they would come at Ninka's wall, and the first spear would land before she could nock. Marcus knelt beside her. He watched the trees over the top of a glowing herb bed. "They're forming up. I can hear them." "I need eyes past the pines," Rebecka said. "Or they hit the wall before I loose." Marcus reached to his belt. He unclipped a small compass and pressed it into her palm. The face was pale gold. A red needle sat still under the glass. "My father's," he said. "It points at what's hidden. Ask it a true question. It'll answer." "You never told me you had this." "I'm telling you now." She held the compass flat. She thought of the raider line. She thought of the shape of a war party in the dark. "Show me where they mass." The red needle swung. It stopped hard, pointing past the north corner of the yard, into the pines left of the ridge trail. Not the wall behind her. Not Ninka's wall. The far side. "They moved," she said. "They're setting up north." Marcus's jaw set. "A feint. They want you watching this wall." She turned the compass slowly. The needle held on the north pines. Then it twitched, split, and settled on two points at once, one north, one east. "Two groups," she said. "Small one east. Bigger one north." A gray tabby slid out from under the planter and pressed against her boot. Its collar pulsed pale blue. It stared at the north pines and its ears flattened. The cat had heard them before Marcus had. "Take the north," Marcus said. "I hold the east with the cat." Rebecka ran along the fence to the north corner. The compass burned warm in her fist. She stopped behind the woodpile and lifted her bow. The bowstring lit. The bow pulsed once against her palm, then again, then a dozen times in a soft, quick rhythm. It was reading them through the trees. It marked each raider in the dark like beads on a wire. She drew, sighted where the compass held, and loosed. The arrow hummed into the pines. A man screamed. She nocked again. Loosed. Nocked. Loosed. Four arrows. Four screams. The line broke before it ever left the trees. Shouts. Boots crashing back through brush. The east group heard, and ran too. Rebecka lowered the bow. Five arrows left. The compass needle drifted, searching, then went still, pointing north again — farther out this time. Deeper. Marcus reached her. "They're regrouping." "They're not done," she said. She closed her hand around the compass. "But now I can see them coming."

Rebecka came back through the yard with the compass still warm in her fist. The north pines were empty. The east group had run. But the true problem waited above her, not in the trees. The luminous dome over the house had thinned. She could see the porch lantern through it now, where an hour ago the glass of light had been solid. She found her daughter in the front room, standing under the center beam with both arms raised. Ninka was ten years old. She was holding a house-sized shield up with her hands and her mind. Sweat ran down her temple into the collar of her tunic. Her lips moved in a count Rebecka could not hear. The flower crown in her hair had wilted against her scalp. "Baby," Rebecka said. "Look at me." "If I look I drop it," Ninka said. Her voice was thin. "Two more hours. Maybe." Dawn was four hours off. Rebecka did the math and hated it. Wings moved at the door. Lark Brightwind ducked under the frame, sword still on his back, his huge wings folding tight so they would not brush the walls. The fae warrior had come three weeks ago from his village to fight beside them. Ninka had screamed the first time she saw his wings light up. He had knelt in the dirt until she stopped crying. Now she did not even turn her head at him. "She won't last," Rebecka said. Lark looked up at the shimmer above the beam. "No." "The wards are dead. If she drops it, the house is open." He reached into the pouch at his belt and took out a small bottle. The liquid inside was pale violet and full of slow, drifting light. "From the elders. One dose. It gives back what magic burns." "Why didn't you say you had it?" "I had one," he said. "I was saving it for the wall breach." Rebecka took the bottle. She looked at her daughter's shaking arms. She looked at the thinning dome. She uncorked it. "Ninka. Drink." Ninka opened her mouth without lowering her hands. Rebecka tipped the elixir past her teeth. Ninka swallowed. Her eyes went wide, then steady. The shimmer above the beam brightened. It climbed back to the hard, clean light it had held at dusk. The porch lantern vanished behind it again. Ninka let out a long breath. "I can hold to sunrise. I can hold past it." Rebecka set the empty bottle on the table. Her hands were shaking now, not her daughter's. Lark watched the dome. "That was the last one." "I know." "The wall breach comes tonight or tomorrow." "I know." She picked up her bow. Five arrows in the quiver. A shield that would hold till morning. And no potion left for the next dark.

Rebecka went back outside with five arrows and one shield between her family and the dark. The dome above the house held clean and bright, fed by the last drop they had. She could hear her daughter counting under her breath through the open door. Ten years old. Holding a roof of light over four sleeping heads and two cats. Sunrise was three hours off, and the dome would fall with it. Lark landed beside her at the fence. His wings pulled tight against his back. "She'll drop it when the sun comes," he said. "The elixir carries her that far. No further." "I know." "Then we need her out of the house before it falls. Somewhere they can't track." Rebecka looked at the barn. Marcus had parked the armored crawler there two nights ago, its turquoise plating dulled with mud so it would not shine. Crystal lamps glowed soft under the fenders. It could carry them all. "The crawler," she said. "We move her at first light. Marcus drives. Mother and my sister in the back. Ninka sleeps." "They'll see it leave." She pulled the small square device from her belt pouch. The cloaking prism. Marcus had pressed it into her hand after the last attack and told her to keep it for the worst night. The runes on its face turned slow under her thumb. "They won't," she said. Marcus came out of the barn wiping grease from his hands. He looked at the prism and understood without her speaking. "One charge," he said. "Maybe an hour of cover. After that we're a bright turquoise box in open country." "An hour is the ridge," Rebecka said. "The ridge is caves. Caves buy us a day." He nodded once. That was all she needed. She went back inside. Ninka's arms were still up. Rebecka set a hand on her daughter's wrist. "Baby. When the sun touches the porch, you let it go. Don't fight it. Marcus will carry you to the crawler. You sleep. You've done enough." Ninka's eyes filled but did not spill. "The house." "The house is wood. You are my child." Lark hung a woven swing between two beams in the crawler's back cabin, tassels and cushions stitched with sleep-charms from his village. It would hold Ninka soft through the ride. Rebecka whistled once at the porch rail. Her crow dropped from the eaves, feathers catching the dome's light in blues and violets. She spoke Marcus's name to it, then Katia's, then the address of the cave she meant. The crow flew. Dawn came pink over the pines. The dome thinned, thinned, and went out like a blown candle. Ninka sagged. Marcus caught her. They rolled from the barn under the prism's shimmer, silent, invisible, the house left standing empty behind them. The quiver still had five arrows. The raiders would find only walls.

The crawler slid through the mist under its cloak of light. Marcus drove slow to keep the engine quiet. In the back cabin, Ninka slept in the swing Lark had hung, her breath steady, her fingers still curled from holding the dome. Rebecka watched the ridge rise ahead, gray teeth of stone above the pines. The caves were an hour off. The prism on the dash flickered. She counted the flickers. "Charge is thinning," Marcus said. "Twenty minutes, maybe less." Rebecka leaned to the side window. Something moved on the slope behind them. A rider, low on a shaggy horse, nose to the ground where their wheels had bruised the moss. A raider outrider. He had found the track the mist could not hide. "He'll mark the trail to the ridge," she said. "They'll follow it straight to the caves." "Then we lose the caves," Marcus said. "And everyone waiting in them." She already had the bow in her hand. "Stop at the next bend. Behind the rocks. Keep her asleep." Marcus eased the crawler off the track. Rebecka slipped out under the shimmer of the cloak and dropped to the wet ground. The prism would hide the vehicle a few minutes more. It would not hide her. She ran back along their trail, keeping to the low brush, quiver light on her hip. Five arrows. She would need one. She found a rise above the path and knelt. The bow warmed in her hand and read the slope. It found the rider two hundred paces out and hummed the small warning she hated. Close enough to die. Her jaw tightened. She did not lower the bow. The outrider stopped. He swung down and crouched over the wheel prints. He pulled a strip of red cloth from his belt and tied it to a branch. A marker. Another would follow. Then another. A road drawn straight to her daughter. Rebecka drew. The arrow sang a low note against the string. She let it go. The shot took him through the throat before he could stand. He fell across the marker branch and pulled it down with him. She waited, counting to thirty, watching the trees. No second rider. No horn. Only the horse, wandering off into the mist. She went down to the body. She untied the red cloth and put it in her pocket. She dragged him off the path into the ferns and scattered leaves over the wheel prints as best she could. Four arrows left. When she climbed back into the crawler, the prism died. The turquoise plates showed bright through the trees. Marcus looked at her. "Drive," she said. "He was alone. But he tied a marker before I dropped him. Someone taught him to tie markers. Someone will come looking when he doesn't come back." Marcus drove. The ridge closed around them. Ninka slept on.

The crawler climbed the last of the ridge road with its cloak gone and its paint bright against the pines. Rebecka watched the trees for movement. The cave mouth showed ahead, a dark seam in the rock ringed by pale crystal that caught the morning light. She had sent her crow before dawn with a message for the people hiding inside. She did not know if the crow had reached them. If the cave stood empty, her family would sit on open stone with four arrows and no walls. Marcus stopped the crawler in the trees below the mouth. "I'll go in first," he said. "No," Rebecka said. "If it's empty, we turn around before they see the vehicle from the slope. I go. You keep her in the cab." She slipped out. The crystals along the cave mouth hummed faintly as she came near, a low note under her boots. She kept the bow raised. The bow read the dark and stayed quiet. No target. She stepped inside. The passage bent and opened into a wide chamber lit by veins of gold running through the walls. Empty bedrolls. A cold fire pit. A cup on its side. No people. Her chest went tight. She turned to go back for Marcus and the crawler. Wings snapped open behind her. She spun, arrow drawn, and stopped with the point a hand's breadth from Lark Brightwind's chest. His huge wings folded down at once. He held both palms open. "It's me," he said. She lowered the bow. "Where are they?" "Deeper in. Second chamber. The crow came at first light." He held up a black feather. "We moved them off the front room in case someone else read the message. Twenty-two. Three children. Your mother is with them." Rebecka's knees wanted to give. She kept them locked. "Katia is here?" "She came in yesterday. She has been waiting for you." "Marcus has Ninka in the crawler. She's asleep." "Bring them in. I'll cover the mouth." Lark drew his sword and stepped past her toward the light. He paused. "The outrider you dropped. Was he alone?" "He was alone. But he tied a marker before I killed him." Lark's voice went quieter. "Then they will come." "Yes." She went back down the slope. Marcus lifted Ninka from the swing without waking her. Rebecka carried the quiver and walked ahead with the bow ready. At the cave mouth Katia stepped out of the shadow and took Ninka from Marcus's arms without a word. Her face was wet. Rebecka let her mother pass and turned to look back down the ridge road. The trees stood still. For now. "We're inside," she said. "And they know where inside is."

Rebecka stepped away from the mouth and followed her mother deeper into the cave. The passage narrowed, then opened into a second chamber lit by veins of pink and blue crystal. Twenty-two people sat along the walls. Bedrolls. A low fire under a stone vent. Three children close to the adults. Katia laid the sleeping Ninka on a folded blanket and knelt beside her. Marcus set his pack down and drew a short blade. Lark stayed at the mouth with his sword. A man near the back stood up. He was thin, coat torn at one shoulder, hands shaking. He stared at the passage behind Rebecka like he could already hear boots on the ridge. "They followed you," he said. "You brought them here." "Sit down," Rebecka said. "I'm not dying in a hole." He grabbed a satchel and moved toward the passage. "I'll take my chances in the trees." Rebecka stepped in front of him. "If you walk out now, their scouts see you on open stone. They come straight to this mouth. Everyone here dies. Including the children." "You don't know that." "I killed their outrider yesterday. He set a marker before he died. They already know the ridge. They don't know the exact mouth yet. You show them." He tried to push past her. Rebecka set her palm flat on his chest and did not move. A low sound came from the dark behind the fire. Slow breath, then weight on stone. A bear stepped into the crystal light. It was larger than any bear Rebecka had seen, dark fur marked with pale runes that glowed faint blue. A crystal pendant hung at its throat on a leather cord. It did not growl. It looked at the man. Katia spoke without standing. "The cave has a keeper. He lets us stay. He does not let us leave stupid." The bear took one more step. The man went still. His satchel slid from his fingers. Rebecka lowered her hand. "Sit by the fire. Drink water. If you still want to run at dusk, I'll walk you to a safer draw myself. Not now." He sat. His shoulders shook once and stopped. Rebecka turned to Lark. "How many ways in?" "Two. This mouth. A crack at the back a child could crawl through. I can seal the crack with stones in an hour." "Do it." She looked at Marcus. "We set the four arrows I have left for the mouth. Nothing else." Marcus nodded. Katia was watching Ninka's face. The bear settled on its haunches by the passage and closed one eye. The pendant at its throat pulsed once and dimmed. Rebecka let out a breath she had been holding since the ridge. The refugee was seated. No one had run. The mouth was still a secret. Then Ninka opened her eyes and sat up, and said, "Mama. Something is walking in my head."

Ninka sat up on the folded blanket. Her eyes were wide and steady. "Mama. Something is walking in my head. Right now." Rebecka knelt beside her daughter. The crystal veins in the walls threw pink light across Ninka's face. Katia set a hand on the girl's shoulder and did not speak. Marcus moved closer, blade still drawn. Lark stayed at the mouth. "Is it hurting you?" Rebecka asked. "No. It's touching. Like fingers on a door." Rebecka's mouth went dry. A raider mage scrying from the ridge could pin them the way the hooded one had pinned Ninka at the house. One wrong answer and her daughter would draw a knife across her own throat, or worse, guide the enemy straight to this chamber. But Ninka had allies Rebecka did not fully understand. It could be a friend. "Can you tell who?" Rebecka said. "Not yet. It's careful." Rebecka pulled the compass Marcus had given her from her coat. She thumbed it open. The needle spun, then settled toward the ridge behind them, far off. One heavy cluster. No smaller mark near the cave mouth. No mage crouched above the crack in the back. "No one close enough to scry cold," Marcus said, reading over her shoulder. "If it's a raider, they're reaching a long way." "Or it's not a raider." Rebecka looked at Ninka. "Can you meet it without opening the door?" Ninka nodded. She closed her eyes. Her fingers curled in the blanket. Katia lifted a bundle from her own pack and unrolled it on the stone. A wide hoop, feathers, small crystals knotted along the threads. She hung it from a spur of rock above Ninka's head. The crystals caught the cave light and threw soft color across the girl's face. "My mother's," Katia said. "It filters what comes in." At Ninka's ankle, something moved that had not been there a breath before. A jumping spider the size of a cat, dark fur banded with violet, faint rings of light turning around its legs. It set two forelegs on Ninka's knee. "He's with me," Ninka whispered, eyes still shut. "He walks where I walk." The spider's eyes fixed on the empty air above the hoop. Ninka drew a slow breath. Then she smiled. "It's Gran's sister," she said. "The one on the coast. She felt the shield break. She's been looking for us for two days." Katia's hand went to her mouth. "Tell her the ridge. Tell her the caves." "She already knows. She's sending riders." Rebecka let the compass close. Her hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against her knees until they stopped. "How long?" she asked. Ninka opened her eyes. "Three days. Maybe four." Marcus met Rebecka's look. The raiders on the compass were closer than that. Help was coming. It would not come in time.

Rebecka closed the compass. The heavy cluster on the ridge had not moved, but a second, smaller mark had blinked into being closer to the cave mouth. One rider. Alone. Sitting still. "A mage," Marcus said. He kept his voice low so the refugees in the deeper chamber would not hear. "Set apart from the war party. Scrying." "For what?" Lark asked. He had come in from the mouth, sword still in his hand, wings folded tight against his back so they would not scrape the stone. "Magic," Rebecka said. "Any spark we throw. He'll draw a line straight to us." Ninka was still sitting on the blanket under the hoop of feathers and crystals. The violet spider crouched by her knee. Katia stood behind her granddaughter with a hand on the girl's hair. "Then Ninka drops the connection," Rebecka said. "Now. Anything humming, we kill it." "She has already let go," Katia said. "I felt it go quiet." Ninka nodded. "The coast is closed." Rebecka looked at the hoop above her daughter. The crystals were still faintly lit. She looked at the spider. She looked at the walls, veined pink and violet, glowing on their own. "The cave itself," she said. "The stones are lit." Lark set his palm against the wall. "They've always been lit. Old magic. Slow. Not the kind a scryer reads. He's listening for a spike. A cast." "Then no one casts," Rebecka said. "Not the hoop. Not the spider. Not a single ward. Not until Gran's riders come or the mage moves off." Katia lifted the dreamcatcher down from the spur of rock. She wrapped it in cloth from her pack, layer over layer, until the crystals stopped throwing color. She tucked the bundle into the deepest fold of her robe. "Send him away," she told Ninka, quiet. The girl bent to the spider. She pressed her forehead to its. The spider stepped back once, twice, then was gone between one blink and the next. "He walks where I walk," Ninka whispered. "He'll come when I call." Rebecka opened the compass again. The lone mark on the ridge held its position for a long breath. Then it drifted. Then it turned north, back toward the heavy cluster. "He lost us," Marcus said. "He lost the noise," Rebecka corrected. "He knows a ridge went silent that was humming a minute ago. He'll mark this ridge on a map and bring the whole band to walk it stone by stone." Lark met her eyes. "How long?" Rebecka watched the cluster on the compass. It was already moving. Not fast. Steady. "Before Gran's riders," she said. "A day. Maybe less." She closed the compass. Twenty-two people behind her in the dark, no wards, no potions, five arrows, and a daughter she had just ordered to stop being magic.

Rebecka opened the compass again. The lone mark had joined the cluster on the ridge road. Both were moving north now, back toward the main war party. Once the mage reached them, the whole band would turn south and walk this ridge until they found the cave. She had until he got there. No longer. "I have to stop him before he reports," she said. "On the road. Alone." Marcus set his hand on her arm. "He's an hour ahead. On horseback. You're on foot with five arrows." "Then I don't need six." Lark shook his head. "The bow hums when you draw. He'll feel a cast from a mile off and ride harder. You lose him." She knew he was right. The bow read the target. The bow warned her. The bow was magic, and the mage was listening for magic. Any shot she took at range would announce her before the arrow flew. She was still turning that over when the cold hit her spine. A voice behind her left ear. Low. Familiar. Not in the cave. "Becka." She turned. No one there. Katia had gone still by the wall. Ninka was staring at the blanket in her lap, both hands flat against it, as if pressing something down. "Mama," Ninka whispered. "He's in the edge of it. He found the quiet." Rebecka knew the voice. She had known it before she heard the name. Dirk. Her ex-husband. Somewhere far from here, holding a doll bound to a doll, using her daughter's stilled mind as a doorway because nothing else was humming for him to ride. "Get out," Rebecka said. "Road north," Dirk said. Flat. Even. "Your rider. I can drop him." "No." "Say yes. He falls. Horse falls. He doesn't reach them." "What do you want." "You. Later. Not today." Katia's hand closed hard on Rebecka's wrist. Katia had heard enough to know who was speaking. Her face said no. Marcus had drawn a knife without deciding to. Lark's wings had opened a hand's width against the stone. Rebecka thought of twenty-two people in the deeper chamber. She thought of Ninka's small hands pressed flat on the blanket. She thought of what Dirk's magic cost, and who usually paid. "No," she said again. "Out of her. Now." The cold went. Ninka let out a breath and slumped against Katia. Rebecka opened the compass. The two marks moved on, steady, north. The mage would reach the war party. The war party would turn. She had refused the only hand offered to stop him, and she had refused it for a reason she would not take back. "They're coming," she said. "By tomorrow. We hold the cave, or we don't." She closed the compass and looked at her daughter, and began to plan for a fight she could not run from.

Rebecka laid the five arrows on the cave floor and counted them again. Five shafts. A war party of forty, maybe more, marching down the ridge by morning. The math had not changed since Marcus told it to her an hour ago. She would drop five and the rest would walk over her body into the deeper chamber, where her mother and daughter waited behind sealed stone. She needed more arrows. There were no more arrows. The quiver from her father's cache had been full when she pulled it out of the birch wood, and star-forged shafts did not grow back. She walked to the mouth of the cave where the crystals in the walls threw pale light on the floor. She sat with her back against the cold stone and closed her eyes. She thought of her brother, seventeen and dead in the yard. She thought of the person who had run and left the quiver behind. She thought, help me. When she opened her eyes a woman was standing in front of her. Bare feet on the stone. War paint dry on her cheeks. A quiver on her back, full, the fletchings the same dull silver as Rebecka's five. A pendant of small beads at her throat, the kind a child would string. Rebecka did not move. She had seen this woman at the edge of dreams for years and never in a room. "Stand up," the woman said. Rebecka stood. "I am Aiyana. I carried these before your grandmother's grandmother. They answer the same blood." "I have five." "You have what is in my quiver too. Reach." Rebecka reached. Her hand did not pass through the leather. It closed on a shaft. She drew it out. The hum was the same as her own. She drew a second. A third. She counted twelve before her hand met the bottom. "They spend when you loose them," Aiyana said. "They do not come back. Use them on the ones who will not turn." "Why now." "You asked. And the other one is close to your girl again. I mean to be here when he tries." Rebecka's throat closed. "Dirk." "I know his knot. I know what it costs him. I will be at your shoulder when he comes for her." Rebecka gathered the arrows into her own quiver. Seventeen shafts now. Not enough for forty. Enough to matter. She walked back to Marcus and Lark at the fire. Katia looked up from where Ninka slept against her side and saw the full quiver and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that a mother did not already know. "We hold the mouth," Rebecka said. "I have twelve more. And I am not alone at my back." Outside, on the ridge road, the first horns of the war party sounded.

The horns sounded again on the ridge. Closer this time. Rebecka looked down the throat of the cave to where the back chamber sat sealed behind stone Lark had closed. Her mother and her daughter were in there. Twenty other people with them. If the line at the mouth fell, they would not hear it. They would only hear boots. By then it would be too late to hide, too late to run the smaller cracks that led out through the crystal seams. She walked back to the sealed wall. Lark stood with his glowing wings folded flat against his back. Marcus was checking arrow points at the fire. "I need a way to speak through the stone," Rebecka said. "If we fall out here, they have to know before the raiders find the seal." Lark shook his head. "I sealed it to hide them. Opening a channel undoes that." "Not the seal. A word. One word through, and nothing back." Marcus stood. "The crow." Rebecka pulled the enchanted watchcrow from her pack. It had carried her voice before. It could carry one more sentence. She whispered into its feathers, "They are through. Go deeper. Do not come out." The crow blinked once and settled against her collar, warm, waiting. "Give it to Katia," she said. She rapped the stone three times. A pause. Then Katia's voice on the other side, low. "I hear you." "Lark opens a finger of space. Long enough to pass the crow. Then he shuts it again." "Do it." Lark pressed his palm to the seam. A hairline of light opened, no wider than a wrist. Rebecka pushed the crow through. Katia's hand closed around it on the other side. The light died. The stone was whole again. "If the crow speaks, you take Ninka out through the back cracks," Rebecka said to the wall. "You do not wait for me." A long silence. Then, "I will not wait." Rebecka pressed her forehead to the cold stone. Behind her, Aiyana stood at the fire with her quiver, patient. Rebecka could feel her there without turning. She walked back to the mouth. Marcus set the four arrows at the notch. Lark drew his blade. Rebecka strung her bow and counted her shafts one more time. Seventeen. Outside, the war party crested the ridge road. She could see torches now, moving down the switchbacks in a slow line. Forty, maybe more. The back chamber was blind no longer. Whatever happened at the mouth, Katia would know the moment it mattered. Ninka would be moved before the raiders reached the seal. It was the last thing Rebecka could give them. She had given it. Now there was only the line, and the arrows, and the road coming down the ridge. She raised her bow.

The torches were halfway down the switchbacks when Rebecka lowered her bow. Seventeen arrows against forty men. If she loosed from the mouth, they would fan out across the open slope and flank her before her quiver ran dry. She needed the road to become a throat. She turned to the fire. Aiyana stood there with her own quiver on her back, red fletchings above her shoulder, war paint dry on her cheeks. She had not moved since the horns started. She met Rebecka's eyes and waited. "They spread on open ground," Rebecka said. "I need them single file." "Then close the ground," Aiyana said. Rebecka looked past her, into the cave. The walls were seamed with old crystal, thick veins of it running up into the dark. Lark had told her the stone here held a subtle magic. Too quiet to be scried. Maybe not too quiet to be woken. "Lark," she said. "The crystals in the walls. Can you drop the outer lip?" Lark folded his wings tight and studied the mouth. "I can crack the shelf above the road. It will bring the overhang down. The gap left will be one man wide." "Do it." "It will cost me. I will not be much use after." "Do it now." Marcus was already moving. He pulled Rebecka back from the mouth and set his shoulder against the inner wall. Lark walked out to the lip. The torches on the ridge were close enough now that Rebecka could hear boots on scree. Lark laid both palms flat on the crystal shelf above the opening. He spoke one word. The veins in the stone lit gold, then white, then went out. The shelf groaned. Then it came down. Rock hammered the road in front of the cave. Dust rolled back into the chamber. Rebecka covered her face with her arm. When the roar stopped, she stepped forward. The slope in front of the mouth was gone. In its place was a spill of broken stone and a narrow slot between two standing crystals, chest high, wide enough for one man with his shoulders turned. Beyond it, the raider line had stopped. She heard shouting. The torches shifted, looking for another way down. There was no other way down. Not for a mile in either direction. Lark sat down hard against the wall. His wings dimmed to a dull glow. "That is all I have," he said. Rebecka nocked the first arrow and set her eye on the slot. The bow hummed against her palm. When the first raider came through, she would know. Behind her, Aiyana drew her own bow and stood at Rebecka's shoulder. "One at a time," Aiyana said. "That is a kind of mercy." The first shape moved into the slot. The bow warmed. Rebecka drew.

The first shape stopped in the slot. It did not step through. Rebecka held her draw. The bow stayed warm but did not spike to the killing note. The raider was there, close enough to shoot, but he was not moving into her line. "He's waiting," Aiyana said. "For what." A second shape crowded behind the first. Then a third. Rebecka saw a long pole pass forward over their shoulders. Not a spear. Something wrapped in dark cloth, thick at one end. They set it against the standing crystal on the left side of the slot and stepped back. Rebecka eased the draw off. "They're setting something on the stone." "A charge?" Marcus said. He had come up behind her with his short blade drawn. "Maybe. Maybe a ward-breaker. I can't see it." She could not shoot the bundle. The crystals stood between her and it. If she guessed charge and it was a scrying anchor, she wasted an arrow and told them exactly where she stood. If she guessed anchor and it was a charge, the slot came open and forty men walked through. She pulled the compass from her belt and flipped it open. The needle swung once and settled hard on the bundle. Then the eye above the needle blinked. It had never done that before. She tilted the face toward Marcus. "Truth says it's alive," he said. "That's a caster, not a bomb." "Someone's hand is on the other end of it." She closed the compass. If a mage was feeding the thing through the cloth, killing the mage killed the bundle. But the mage was behind the wall of men, out of her sight. She whistled once, low. The crow dropped from the dark of the ceiling and landed on her wrist. Its eyes were lit. She spoke against its feathers. "Find the one who is casting. Mark him for me." The crow lifted and slid through the slot above the raiders' heads before they could turn. She counted four breaths. The crow's cry came back sharp from the middle of the war party. Rebecka nocked one of the red-fletched arrows Aiyana had given her. She could not see the target. She trusted the bow to read what the crow had marked. She drew, angled the shot high over the slot, and loosed. The arrow cleared the crystals and dropped out of sight. A man screamed on the far side. The bundle against the crystal went dark and slumped in its wrappings. The front raider flinched. He stepped into the slot to see what had happened. The bow sang the killing note. Rebecka put the next arrow through his throat. He fell in the slot and jammed it. The men behind him shouted and began to drag the body back. Fifteen arrows left. The mage was dead. The bottleneck was hers. Then a horn sounded from the ridge above the cave. Not the road. Above.

The horn above the cave died. In its place, a sound came from inside Rebecka's own skull. A voice she knew. A voice she had once shared a house with. Let me in, Rebecka. You are going to lose her. She grabbed the crystal wall to steady herself. The bow warmed in her other hand. Marcus was still behind her, watching the slot. He had not heard it. Only she had heard it, and Ninka, somewhere behind the sealed stone, would be hearing it too. "Dirk," she said out loud. Marcus turned. "Where." "In my head. Through Ninka." His jaw set. "Shut him out." "I'm trying." The voice came again, closer, warmer, the way it had been when she was young and stupid. Say yes. One word. I will burn the ridge for you. She saw it then, a picture pushed behind her eyes: a stitched doll bound in cord, pins driven in at the shoulders and the gut, her own name scratched on a patch at its chest. He was showing her what he held. Her draw hand shook. An arrow slipped from her fingers and rang on the stone. "Rebecka." Marcus caught her elbow. "Eyes on the slot." "He's using her as the door. If I answer, he walks in through her." Marcus looked at the sealed chamber wall, then back at her. "Then we close the door." He reached into his belt and pulled a small glass vial, the last of a set she thought he had already spent. He broke it against the floor. A pale eye opened in the air between them, wide as a shield, its iris blue and gold. It turned to her without blinking. "Report," Marcus said. "A man is pushing on the girl's mind from the north slope," the eye said. "He is not with the war party. He stands alone under a black tree. His right hand holds a doll. His left hand is empty." "Range?" "Four hundred paces. Above the cave. He is why the horn sounded." Rebecka's bow found the note before she did. She did not need to see him. The eye had marked him, the way the crow had marked the mage. "Tell my mother," she said to the crow on the ledge. It lifted and slipped through the crack toward the sealed chamber. Then she spoke into her own head, hard, the way she had learned to speak to him years ago. Get out. She drew a red-fletched arrow, angled the shot up and over the crystal, and loosed on the eye's line. The pressure in her skull cut off mid-word. Not gone. Cut. Like a hand pulled off a door. Fourteen arrows. The slot was still hers. Above, on the ridge, something heavy fell against stone and did not get up. But the doll, she knew, had not burned. He had only let go of the rope.

The cut in her skull was clean, but the rope was not gone. Rebecka felt it still, a thin cord pulled tight from somewhere behind her eyes to somewhere on the north slope. Dirk had let the doll fall from his hand when the arrow took him. He had not burned it. The binding held. She leaned against the crystal wall. The cave lights pulsed pink and blue along the vein above her head. A wave rolled up from her stomach and she almost took a step toward the slot mouth, toward the ridge, toward him. Her foot moved before she told it to. "Marcus." She caught the crystal to stop herself. "He's still pulling. The doll is on the ground up there and it's still pulling." Marcus looked at the slot, then at her feet. "Then we cut it here. I can't leave the mouth." "I know." She looked at Aiyana. The ghost stood a pace behind her, bow loose at her side, war paint dark under the crystal light. "Can you burn it from here?" "No," Aiyana said. "Not mine to burn. Yours." "Then tell me how." "I don't know the knot he used." A voice came from the back of the chamber. "I do." An old man stepped out from among the sheltering refugees. Rebecka had passed him twice and not looked at his face. Bone beads at his throat. A staff with a lit crystal at its head. Fur across one shoulder. He walked like his knees hurt. "Makani," Katia said behind him. "He rode in with the coast people's messenger last night. He knows Dirk's line of work." Makani stopped in front of Rebecka. He smelled like smoke and dried root. "Your mother told me what he carries. Show me your hand." She held it out. He turned it over, pressed his thumb into the meat below her thumb, and she felt the cord jump inside her chest. "There," he said. "He tied it to the wanting. Not the fear. That is why you keep almost walking to him." "Cut it." "You cut it. I only show you where." He took the dreamcatcher hoop from Katia's arm and pressed it flat against Rebecka's chest. The crystals in the web warmed. "Name what you want from him. Out loud. Then take it back." Rebecka's throat closed. Marcus did not turn from the slot. Aiyana waited. "I wanted him to be sorry," Rebecka said. The cord in her chest tightened. "I wanted him to say my name like he used to. I wanted him to stop." Her voice broke on the last word. "I take it back. All of it. He owes me nothing. I want nothing from him." Something snapped behind her sternum. Not loud. Clean. She staggered. Makani caught her elbow. The pull toward the north slope was gone. Her feet were her own. "It's cut," she said. Makani nodded. "The doll is just cloth now. But he taught it to others. Expect company at your daughter's door."

Makani's warning sat in the cave like a second cold. Rebecka turned away from the slot mouth and looked toward the sealed chamber behind the crystal wall. Ninka was in there. Ninka was ten. If another of Dirk's students carried the same knot, they would slip it around her daughter's throat before anyone saw them come. "How many did he teach?" Rebecka asked. Makani leaned on his staff. The crystal at its head threw green light on his cheek. "Three that I know. He liked to teach at night. Two of them still breathe." "Names." "I don't have names. I have faces." He tapped his temple. "Bring her out. She can look with me." Rebecka's stomach turned. "No." "She's the one they want. She's the one who'll feel them first." His voice stayed flat. "Better she sees them now, in here, than out there when their cord is already tied." Katia was already at the seal. She pressed her palm to the stone and spoke Ninka's name once. Lark, slumped against the wall, lifted a hand and cracked the hairline gap. Ninka slipped through. Katia sealed it behind her. Ninka came to Rebecka first. She was small in the star-patterned robe. Her eyes were tired. "I felt him die," she said. "It was quiet after." "It's not quiet yet," Rebecka said. "Makani needs you to look at two people with him. In your head. That's all." Ninka nodded once. "Sit me down." Makani sat cross-legged on the cave floor. Ninka sat facing him. He set the dreamcatcher hoop between their knees. He put one bone bead in her palm. "Hold this. Look where I look. Don't step in. Just see." Ninka closed her eyes. Makani closed his. The crystals in the wall pulsed once, low. Rebecka watched her daughter's face. A minute passed. Ninka's mouth tightened. "The tall one," Ninka said. "The woman with the burned ear. She's coming down the coast road with the riders Gran's sister sent." Rebecka's breath stopped. "Their own riders." "She rode in with them," Makani said, eyes still shut. "She waited for the escort. She'll be inside our line before she moves." "The other one," Rebecka said. Ninka's forehead creased. "Dead. In a ditch. Someone got there first." Makani opened his eyes. "Then we have one. And we have three days before she reaches this cave." Rebecka pulled Ninka up by the shoulders. Her daughter's weight was nothing. "You did enough. Back to Gran." Ninka held on a second longer than usual. "Mom. She has a doll of me already. I felt the string." Rebecka's hand went cold around the bow. "Then we cut it before she pulls," she said. "Same as I did. You name what you want from her and give it back." Ninka looked up. "I don't know her yet." "You will," Rebecka said. "In three days."

Ninka stayed at Rebecka's hip after Makani left the ring of crystals. The bone bead was still warm in her palm. Rebecka took her daughter's shoulders and turned her toward the light. "You said you felt the string. Can you follow it back?" "To her," Ninka said. "Not into her." "That's enough." Rebecka knelt so their eyes matched. "A doll needs a piece of the person to answer. Hair. Skin. Spit on a rag. I don't have any of that. Without it I can't cut her cord to you. If I try blind, the doll strikes first and it strikes you." Ninka's mouth moved once and stilled. "Then get me a piece." Rebecka looked up. The floating eye hung near the cave roof, blue iris steady on them. She had conjured it a season ago and it had watched ever since. "You. Coast road. Woman with the burned ear, riding with Gran's sister's escort. I need something of her body. Not a name. A thing." "I see her," the eye said. "She rides third. She chews a strip of leather when she thinks. She spat it out an hour ago at the ford." "Where." "South bank. Under a flat stone by the willow root." Lark pushed himself off the wall. He was gray from the crystal shelf. Rebecka held out the last shimmering vial Makani had pressed on her, the recovery draught, and he drank half and gave it back. Color came into his face. "One trip," he said. "The between-road. I can hold it that long." "Go," Rebecka said. He stepped sideways into nothing and was gone. Ninka sat on the cave floor with the dreamcatcher across her knees. The feathers on it stirred though no wind moved in the cave. "She's touching the doll," Ninka said. Her voice went quieter. "My chest feels tight." "Hold the hoop against it." Ninka pressed the crystals to her sternum. Her breathing evened. Rebecka counted. Forty seconds. A minute. Two. Lark stepped back out of the air with a wet strip of leather pinched between two fingers. He dropped it into Rebecka's palm and folded down onto the stone. Makani came fast when Rebecka called. He laid the leather on the hoop between Ninka and the crystal wall. "Same as before," he said. "Name what she wants from you. Give it back." Ninka closed her eyes. "She wants me afraid of her." She opened them. "I'm not." Makani drew a bone knife across the leather. The strip parted. Ninka gasped once and then breathed clean. The eye drifted lower. "She has stopped her horse. She is holding her chest. She is looking at her hand." "She knows," Rebecka said. "She knows," the eye agreed. "And she has turned her horse off the road. She rides alone now, toward this cave, ahead of the escort." Rebecka stood. Two days, not three.

The eye still hung near the cave roof. Rebecka watched its blue iris track the woman on the coast road. "How fast is she?" "Fast," the eye said. "She has cut inland. She rides through scrub now, not road." Rebecka pulled the compass from her belt and flicked the lid. The needle spun and settled north-northwest, then wandered. It marked a moving point, not a fixed one. That was the problem. The woman could come by any of three draws below the ridge. Only one funneled to the bottleneck at the cave mouth. The other two crossed rock the eye could barely track and let a single rider slip past into the trees above them. From above, she could drop a pin on Ninka through the roof cracks and never show her face. Ninka stood at Rebecka's elbow with the dreamcatcher against her chest. Her hood was up. She spoke low. "Let me look." "Not into her. You said." "Not into her. At the ground under her." Ninka closed her eyes. Her lashes twitched. "Dry creek. Red stones. A dead pine leaned across it." Rebecka looked at the eye. "Do you see that." "East draw," the eye said. "She is in the east draw." The east draw did not reach the bottleneck. It climbed to the ridge shoulder above the cave. Rebecka's chest went cold. "How long." "An hour. Less if the horse holds." Rebecka moved. She grabbed the quiver and counted arrows by touch. Fifteen. She turned to Lark where he lay against the wall. "Can you walk." "I can sit up," Lark said. "I can't cut stone again." "I need you at the slot with Marcus. If I miss her, she comes down the throat behind me. Hold the line." He nodded once. Rebecka took Ninka's face in her hands. "You stay under this hood. You stay by Makani. You do not look at her again." "I won't." Ninka's voice went quiet. "Mom. She has a doll of you now. She made it on the ride." Rebecka let that sit for one breath. Then she let it go. "Then I'd better shoot first." She climbed the fissure at the back of the front chamber, up through the crack Lark had left open for air. She came out on the ridge shoulder in cold light. The east draw opened below her, red stones bright. She lay flat on the stone. The bow warmed under her hand. The rider came around the dead pine at a canter. Burned ear on the left side. A cloth bundle at her hip. The bow hummed. Range good. Kill sure. Rebecka hated it and drew anyway. One arrow. The woman went off the horse sideways and did not move. The eye drifted down to the body. "She is dead." Rebecka stayed flat. The bundle at the woman's hip had spilled. Not one doll. Three. Small, bound, waiting to be given out. One student down. Two names she did not know, already carrying her face.

Rebecka came down the fissure with the three dolls in her jacket. She could feel them against her ribs. Small weight. Cloth and hair and bone-dust. Each one was her. Each one was a door someone else could open from far away. Makani was waiting in the front chamber with Katia. The old shaman had spread a square of hide on the floor. On it sat a black iron pot with a stir wand laid across the rim. Green runes ran around its belly. Katia stood beside it with her arms folded inside her sleeves. "Sit," Katia said. "Put them down." Rebecka knelt. She laid the three dolls on the hide in a row. They looked like her in the way a shadow looks like a person. Braided hair. A scrap of her old shirt. One had a chip of fingernail pressed into its chest. "Two students left," Rebecka said. "If I burn these, do they feel it?" "They feel the cut," Makani said. "Not the fire. The fire is for you." Katia crouched. Her knees cracked. She touched the doll with the fingernail. "This one is closest. This one has the most of you in it." "Can we do all three at once." "Yes," Katia said. "It will hurt." "I don't care." "You will." Katia met her eyes. "But you should still do it." Makani poured water from a skin into the pot. He added a pinch of ash from a pouch, then a curl of the leather strip Lark had brought back from the ford. The water went dark before it heated. He stirred once with the wand. The runes on the pot brightened. "Name what ties you to them," Makani said. "Same as before. Name it and drop it in." Rebecka looked at the dolls. "They want me afraid. They want me tired. They want me to bargain for my daughter." "Then?" "I don't bargain." She picked up the first doll and dropped it in the pot. "I'm not afraid of you." The second. "I'm not tired enough to stop." The third. "And she is not yours." The water hissed. A cord she had not seen tore loose from her sternum, then another, then another. Her breath went out. She put her palms flat on the stone to keep from falling. Somewhere far off, two people she had never met felt a hook rip out of their hands. She knew it the way she knew a shot was true. The pot went quiet. The dolls were gone. Only dark water remained. "Done," Makani said. Katia put a hand on Rebecka's shoulder. "They know your face now. And they know you cut them." A pause. "Sleep an hour. You've earned it." Rebecka stood. She did not sleep. Two students, unbound, still had her name. But no distant hand could kill her in her chair. The next one would have to come close.

Rebecka woke on the stone with her jacket bunched under her head. The pot was gone. Katia was gone. Marcus sat against the wall with a knife across his knees, watching the slot at the cave mouth. The fire was low. She sat up and the cut cords in her chest ached like new bruises. "Two left," she said. "And I don't know where." "No," Marcus said. "But Ninka might." She went back through the fissure to the sealed chamber. Katia let her in. Ninka was sitting up on a folded blanket, pale, small. The dream-catcher hoop lay in her lap. "Baby," Rebecka said. "I need you one more time. Not long. Just a look." Ninka nodded. "The ones you cut." "Yes. Where are they now." Katia frowned. "She's tired." "I know." Rebecka knelt. "One look. If she can't hold it, we stop." Aiyana stepped out of the shadow at the wall. She had been there the whole time. She did not make sound when she moved. The red fletching over her shoulder caught the low light. "I'll steady her," Aiyana said. She crouched behind Ninka and laid two fingers on the back of the girl's neck. "Look for the raw ends. Where you cut. Follow them back." Ninka closed her eyes. Her mouth moved without words. A minute passed. Two. Her small hand tightened on the hoop. "A man," she said. "North. In a cabin with a black stove. He's writing." Her forehead creased. "He knows I'm looking. He's angry." "Good," Rebecka said. "The other one." Ninka's breath hitched. "Closer. Much closer. On a horse. Coming up the coast road with three men." Her eyes opened. "He has a doll. New one. He's making it as he rides." "How far." "Half a day." Aiyana lifted her fingers. Ninka slumped against her grandmother. Rebecka stood. She had wanted a map. She had a knife at her throat. Half a day. Making the doll on horseback meant he had her hair or her skin already, from the woman with the burned ear, and he meant to bind Ninka before he arrived. She went back to the front chamber. Marcus was already on his feet. "Coast road," she said. "Four riders. Half a day. He's building a doll for her while he moves." "Then we don't wait here." "No." She pulled the quiver over her shoulder. Fifteen arrows. Enough. "I ride out and meet him before he finishes it. You hold the slot." Marcus's jaw set. "Alone." "He's on open road. I only need one shot." He looked at her a long moment. "Take the mare." Aiyana was already at the cave mouth, bow strung. "I go with her." Rebecka did not argue. She checked her string and stepped out into the cold light. The next student was named now. He was moving. And she was moving faster.

The white mare took the ridge trail at a hard trot. Aiyana rode a pace behind, silent, red fletching bright over her shoulder. Rebecka pulled the mare up where the trail forked toward the coast. Three tracks broke off the main road here. Low road along the beach. Middle road through the pines. High road along the cliff. She did not know which one four riders would take. She swung down. The coast wind smelled of salt and wet stone. Half a day, Ninka had said. If Rebecka chose wrong she would ride past him while he finished the doll for her daughter. "Compass won't hold him," Rebecka said. "He's warded. Ninka cut him and he felt it." "Then don't ask for him," Aiyana said. She dismounted. "Ask for the doll." Rebecka pulled the compass from her jacket. The face was pale under the clouds. She held it flat on her palm and thought of the thing he was building on horseback. Hair. Skin. A small wooden body wrapped in cord. Her daughter, made small enough to hold. The red needle swung. It stopped pointing at the middle road. "Pines," she said. "Ride," Aiyana said. They took the middle road at a gallop. The trees closed over them. Rebecka watched the compass on the mare's neck. The needle held. Then it slid, sharp, toward the trees on their left. She pulled up. "He's off the road." Aiyana slid down and moved into the pines on foot. Rebecka followed with an arrow on the string. Twenty paces in she saw the smoke of a small fire. Four horses tied. Three men eating. A fourth man sat apart on a log with something in his lap, bent over it, working with a knife and thread. She did not look at his face. She looked at his hands. The bow hummed. The warning came, low in her chest, the one she hated. Close enough to kill. She drew and loosed. The arrow took him through the hand and the doll and into his thigh, pinning all three to the log. He screamed. The three men came up with blades. Aiyana's bow sang twice and two of them dropped. The third ran and Rebecka put an arrow in his back at thirty paces. She walked to the log. The man was white, shaking, trying to pull the arrow free. The doll was half-finished. A twist of dark hair was bound at its head. Ninka's. "Name what you want from him," Aiyana said behind her. "Or it holds after." Rebecka pulled her knife. She cut the hair from the doll. She cut the cord. She cut his throat. She walked back to the mare with the hair in her fist and thirteen arrows left. One student to go. A cabin. A black stove. North.

Rebecka rode north from the coast with the mare pushing hard. Aiyana kept pace beside her. The compass lay flat on the mare's neck, needle still, useless now. The last student was warded like the man in the pines. Somewhere in the northern woods he sat by a black stove, cutting hair and thread into a shape of her daughter. Rebecka had hours, not days. She pulled up at the tree line. "I don't know where the cabin is." "Then ask something that does," Aiyana said. Rebecka reached into her jacket and drew the small vial she kept knotted to the potion cord. She broke the seal and spoke the eye's name into the smoke. The floating eye bloomed above her palm, blue iris ringed in gold thread. "North woods," Rebecka said. "A cabin. One man. A black stove. He is making a doll of a girl." "Searching," the eye said. It drifted up through the pine tops and was gone. Rebecka dismounted. She could not chase blind while it looked. She paced the moss and counted arrows again. Thirteen. Aiyana stood watch on the road. The eye returned inside a quarter hour. "Found." "How far." "Two hours at a hard ride. Follow the creek that forks left at the burnt cedar. The cabin sits in a clearing with three stumps and a shed. He is inside. He is bent over a table. The doll has a face now." Rebecka's stomach dropped. "A face." "Not finished. He is cutting the mouth." "Ride," Aiyana said. They rode. The eye kept pace above the trees, calling turns. Burnt cedar. Left fork. Deer track through the alders. The mare's flanks steamed. Rebecka's thighs burned. She did not slow. They came up on the clearing from the south. Three stumps. A shed. Smoke thin from the roof pipe. One horse tied at the rail. "He has not looked up in an hour," the eye said. "He does not know you are here." Rebecka slid down and moved to the wall on foot. She set an arrow to the string. Aiyana took the back of the cabin. Rebecka counted three and kicked the door. The man jerked up from the table. Thin. Gray at the temples. A knife in one hand, a small wooden figure in the other. Ninka's hair braided at its scalp. He opened his mouth. The bow hummed. Close enough to kill. She loosed. The arrow took him through the throat. He fell across the table and the doll rolled to the floor. Rebecka picked it up. She cut the hair free with her knife. She cut the cord. She dropped the wooden body into the black stove and watched it catch. "Done," the eye said. "Not yet," Rebecka said. She still had the ride back. And Ninka waiting behind stone.

Rebecka stood over the dead man with the stove door still open behind her. The doll was ash. The student was not the end of it. She had come north to break a chain, and a chain had links she had not counted yet. Aiyana came in through the back. She looked at the body, then at the table. "He was writing," Aiyana said. Rebecka turned. Papers lay under the man's arm. Loose sheets, a stitched book, a stack of folded letters bound with twine. The top sheet was covered in tight, slanted script. Not any letters she knew. "Dirk's hand?" she asked. "His teaching," Aiyana said. "Passed on." Rebecka pulled the sheets free. The ink was fresh on two of them. A wax stub sat beside a folded letter, half-sealed. He had been sending word to someone. If another student sat somewhere waiting on that letter, Ninka was not safe behind stone. She was a name on a page moving toward a stranger's hands. "I can't read this," Rebecka said. "Then it goes with us," Aiyana said. "Someone at the cave will." Rebecka shook her head. "Two hours back. If he's sent one already, that's two hours more he has." She swept the shelves. Jars. Bone. A knot of hair. Then a small pendant on a nail by the door, shaped like an open book, script crawling across its faces. She lifted it down. The runes on its edge warmed against her palm. "Makani gave me the name of one of these once," she said. "A charm for foreign hands." She looped it over her neck and picked up the top sheet. The script did not move. Her understanding did. The letters stayed strange and became meaning at the same time. She read. Her stomach turned. "He names her," she said. "Ninka. He gives her age. He gives the ridge." She flipped to the folded letter. Broke the half-seal with her thumb. "To a woman. South of the coast road. He tells her to finish what the others could not. He tells her the girl holds a dome. He tells her the mother shoots at four hundred paces." "Did he send it," Aiyana said. Rebecka checked the wax. Soft. Unstamped. She pressed her thumb into it and it gave. "Not yet." She fed the letter to the stove. Then the stitched book. Then every sheet on the table, one at a time, until the fire ate the last of his hand. She kept the pendant. "One more," she said. "A woman. South of the coast road." Aiyana nodded. "Then we ride." Rebecka stepped out into the clearing. The mare lifted her head. The compass in her jacket lay still against her ribs, waiting for a name to point at. She had one now.

Rebecka set her boot in the stirrup and heard the second horse. It came up the track from the south, easy and unhurried. Not a raider's pace. A courier's. She dropped back off the mare and pressed her hand to the animal's nose. Aiyana had already gone still by the cabin's corner, half-shadow, half-woman. Rebecka moved to the rear of the cabin and looked through the small back window. A man swung down at the front step. Young. Leather satchel across his chest. He whistled a short pattern at the door and waited. When no answer came, he tried again. Then he tried the latch. He stepped inside. Rebecka came around the front. He was already at the table, reading the burned patch where the letters had been. He turned when the door creaked. His hand went to the satchel, not the knife at his belt. That told her everything. He was carrying, not fighting. He was the next link in the chain, riding to collect what she had just burned, and he would ride back south the moment he understood the cabin was cold. "Stay," she said. He bolted for the side window. She drew and loosed. The arrow took him in the thigh and pinned him to the wall. He screamed once and clawed at the shaft. She crossed the room and put her knee on his chest and her knife under his jaw. "Who waits for the letter," she said. He spat at her. His other hand was already inside the satchel, and she saw the shape of a small clay figure through the leather. A signal doll. Break it and the woman south would know. Rebecka cut the strap. The satchel dropped. She kicked it across the floor to Aiyana, who had come in behind her. "Hold it flat," Rebecka said. "Don't let him touch it." The boy thrashed. Rebecka pressed the knife until he stopped. "Name," she said. "The woman. South of the coast road. Where." He shook his head. She saw the choice in his face before he made it. His hand shot up for the arrow shaft in his own leg, meaning to snap it, meaning to bleed out before he could talk. She caught his wrist. Then she looked at Aiyana. Aiyana nodded once. Rebecka drew the knife across his throat. She sat back on her heels and breathed. Two hours south of here he was expected. When he did not come, the woman would move. Rebecka pulled the pendant from under her shirt and lifted the satchel. Inside were folded orders in the same slanted script. She read. A crossroads inn. Three days' ride. A name in the woman's own hand at the bottom. "We have her place," Rebecka said. She stood. "And she does not know we are coming." Aiyana was already at the door.

Rebecka stood over the courier's body with the orders in her hand. The inn was three days south. The courier had been due at his contact's fire within two hours. When he did not arrive, the woman would break camp and vanish into the country between here and the coast, and the name at the bottom of the page would be nothing but ink. "She will run," Rebecka said. "Unless she hears from him first." Aiyana held the satchel flat on the table. Inside sat the clay signal doll, still whole. Rebecka lifted it. It was warm. A thin cord of hair was pressed into the seam at its neck. Break it and the contact felt the break. Keep it whole and silent past the appointed hour, and the contact felt the silence. She needed the third thing. A pulse. A steady hum that said the courier lived and rode. She cut a strand of the dead boy's hair and pressed it into her palm. Then she spoke the eye out of its vial. The floating eye opened in the air above the table, wide and blue, threaded with gold. It looked at the doll. It looked at Rebecka. "The doll carries his hair," Rebecka said. "Can you carry his pulse into it. So the woman at the inn feels him still riding." "Yes," the eye said. "For a day. No longer." "A day is enough." "You will owe the price when it fades." "I know." The eye drifted down and settled its gaze on the clay figure. The doll's surface flushed once, faintly. Then it began to give off a small steady warmth, like a wrist held to the cheek. Rebecka wrapped the doll in cloth and tucked it inside her coat, against her ribs, where a rider's heartbeat would live. She went out to the mare. The white horse waited, mane braided with soft light, saddle draped in pale cloth. Aiyana swung up behind her. Rebecka set her heels and the mare took the between-road at once, ground blurring under its hooves. They rode until the light thinned. On a flat of pale sand she raised a shelter from her pack, a small teepee stitched with charm-marks, and they slept in shifts. The doll at her ribs kept its steady warmth. Somewhere south, a woman at a crossroads inn was told her courier was two hours late, then four, then a night, and each time she reached for the signal she felt him still on the road and stayed at her fire. At second dawn the doll cooled. Rebecka felt it go out against her skin. She did not slow. "She will feel that," Aiyana said. "Then she will run," Rebecka said. "But we are one day from the inn, not three. Ride." The mare took the road again. Ahead, the woman who had ordered Ninka's death was already saddling her horse.

The mare came off the between-road at midmorning, one ridge short of the inn. Rebecka walked her the last mile through scrub and pulled up behind a stand of pines. The inn sat at the fork below, gray timber, steep roof, two chimneys, a porch with flower boxes. Riders were coming and going. She could not see faces from here, and she had never seen the woman she was hunting. If the woman rode out past her now, she would not know it. "I need her face," Rebecka said. "Or her hand. Anything I can hold to." Aiyana slid down and set her palm flat on the ground. "The orders named her. Speak her name to the eye." Rebecka drew the folded page from her coat and read the name once, quietly. Then she spoke the eye out of its vial. The blue eye opened above her shoulder. It turned toward the inn. "Find the woman these orders name," Rebecka said. "Show me what she looks like before she rides." "She is in the back room," the eye said. "Saddlebags on the bed. Gray coat. Left hand shorter two fingers. Braid down her back, half gray. A scar under the jaw, thumb-wide." "How long until she mounts?" "Minutes." "Which door?" "The side yard. A bay horse waits saddled at the rail." "Which road out?" "South fork. She means to ride hard." Rebecka drew the compass her mother had wrapped for her and set the name against the glass. The needle steadied on the inn and did not drift. Alive. In the building. Still there. She walked the mare down through the pines to a bend where the south fork ran between two banks of loose stone. Aiyana climbed the upper bank and lay flat. Rebecka strung the bow and nocked a star-forged arrow. The bow woke against her palm and hummed low, reading the road. The side door of the inn opened. A woman in a gray coat came out with saddlebags over one shoulder. She swung them onto the bay and mounted with a short left hand. A braid, half gray, fell down her back. She turned the horse south. "That is her," the eye said. The bow's hum climbed as the rider came into the cut between the banks. At forty paces the hum went to a single clear note. Kill range. Rebecka hated the sound. She let it stay. She loosed. The arrow took the woman under the collarbone and dropped her from the saddle. The bay shied and ran on. The woman did not move. Rebecka came down the bank. In the gray coat's inner pocket she found a sealed packet and a small black book. She opened the book to the first page. A list of names. Ninka's was the third. "There are more," Aiyana said behind her. "Then we are not done," Rebecka said.

Rebecka carried the black book back up the bank to the pines. The woman in the gray coat lay in the cut behind them. The sealed packet held coin and a folded map. The book held names. Rebecka thumbed the pages and her stomach dropped. After the first page, the writing changed. Row after row of small tight marks she could not read. A cipher. Ninka's name on page one was the last thing she understood. "I can't read it," Rebecka said. "Whoever comes for my daughter next is in here. I can't see them." Aiyana crouched beside her. "Then we cannot shoot first." Rebecka turned the pages. The marks looked like the script in the dead student's cabin, but tighter, packed close. She reached under her collar for the pendant her mother had pressed on her before the ridge. A small charm strung on a leather cord, runes cut into layered plates the size of a thumbnail. She had used it once, on the letters in the stove. She had not tried it on a cipher. She lifted the cord over her head and laid the pendant flat on the open book. The runes warmed against the paper. The marks did not move. She waited. Nothing. "It reads foreign script," Aiyana said. "Not code." "I know." Rebecka stared at the page. Ninka's name at the top was written plain. Only the entries below were hidden. That meant a key. A key the dead woman had carried, or kept close. She went back down the bank. She checked the coat again. Inner pocket, outer pocket, cuff, boot. In the boot she found a thin strip of paper folded to the size of a coin. She unfolded it. Two columns of marks paired with two columns of letters. A cipher key. She climbed back up and laid the strip beside the book. She set the pendant across both. The runes on the charm brightened. The marks on the page shifted, one by one, into words she could read. She went down the list. A name she did not know. A town three days east. A name she did not know. A trade route on the far side of the ridge. Then, near the bottom, a line that stopped her hand. A name. Not a person. A place. Her mother's cave, described by its old shepherd name, with a note beside it. Two riders already sent. Four days out. Rebecka closed the book and put it inside her coat. She stood. "They sent riders before this one died," she said. "To the cave." "How many days?" "Four. Maybe less now." Aiyana was already on her feet. "Then we ride." Rebecka whistled for the mare. The between-road would take them home before dawn. It would not take them home before the riders.

The between-road opened for them at the tree line. Rebecka spurred the white mare through the seam and the world went thin. Grass turned to pale dust. The sky closed to a low band of light. Aiyana rode at her flank, silent. The mare's hooves ate ground in strides that should have taken minutes and took seconds. Rebecka bent low over the mane. The cave was hours away by this road. The riders sent for her mother and daughter had four days' head start on the outer world, but only paces on this one. A shape rose across the path. It had not been there a breath before. Scales the color of wet slate and river stone. Wings folded high. Teeth like knives set in a long jaw. The dragon settled across the road and did not move. Rebecka pulled the mare up hard. Frost bloomed on the dust where the beast breathed out. A thread of fire curled from the other nostril. "Toll," the dragon said. Its voice was low and even. "This road is not free. You crossed twice without paying. You will not cross a third time on debt." Rebecka's hand went to her quiver. Aiyana caught her wrist. "If you loose an arrow here, the road throws you out," Aiyana said. "Wherever it wants. A day from the cave. A week. You will not choose." Rebecka looked at the dragon. She had nothing shaped like coin. She had arrows she could not spare and a book she could not give up. "What do you take?" she asked. "Something kept," the dragon said. "Not something spent." She thought of the pendant at her throat, her mother's charm that had opened the cipher. She could not lose it. She thought of the bow. Without it she was a woman with cold hands. Then her fingers found the talisman tucked inside her coat, the sealed disc her mother had pressed on her the day the wards began to fail. She had never used it. She had carried it because Katia had asked. A dark charm meant to hold darker things off her back. She drew it out. The runes on its face caught the low light. "This," she said. The dragon lowered its head. She set the talisman on the dust between them. The beast breathed once, cold, and the disc frosted white and sank into the road as if into water. "Ride," the dragon said, and stepped aside. Rebecka kicked the mare forward. The road opened again. Wind tore at her hair. Behind her the crow burst from a fold of air and matched pace, eyes bright. Aiyana rode close. "You gave up a shield," Aiyana said. "I bought hours," Rebecka answered. "The riders won't reach the cave before us now." The cave mouth showed ahead, a dark seam in the ridge. Rebecka rode toward it with nothing left at her back to catch what came next.

The between-road spat them out at the top of the ridge. The mare's hooves hit stone. Rebecka slid off and pulled her bow free. The crow landed on her shoulder. Its glowing eyes swept the slope below. The cave mouth sat dark in the rock face. No movement. No sound. Rebecka pressed her palm flat on the ground. Cold stone. She looked at Aiyana. "Where do I stand?" she asked. Aiyana pointed to the cliff edge. "There. You can see the approach from both sides." Rebecka moved to the spot. The ridge dropped steep on three sides. The main road curved up from the south. A narrower track split off toward the east draw. Both were empty. She pulled the compass from her coat. The needle swung east and held. Two dots glowed on the face, close together, moving slowly up the eastern track. "They're an hour out," she said. Aiyana knelt near the cave entrance. She placed one hand on the rock. "Your mother sealed this from the inside. The refugees are deeper in. They won't hear what happens up here." Rebecka counted her arrows. Fourteen remained. The quiver hummed faintly against her back. She had enough. The crow lifted off her shoulder and circled once before settling on a jutting stone above the cave. It watched the eastern track without blinking. Rebecka set an arrow on the string and waited. The wind came cold across the ridge. She thought of Ninka in the sealed chamber below, curled against Katia. Safe for now. Safe as long as the riders didn't reach the cave. The compass needle pulsed. The dots moved closer. She could see them now, two riders picking their way up the narrow track. One wore a dark coat. The other had a blade strapped across his back. They were three hundred paces out when the compass flared. The needle spun and locked south. A third dot appeared on the face, larger than the others, racing up the main road. Rebecka's breath caught. She hadn't planned for three. Aiyana stood. "The third one is faster. He'll reach the cave first." Rebecka shifted her aim to the south. The rider came hard, bent low over a gray horse. He carried no visible weapon. That didn't mean he was unarmed. She drew the string back. The bow warmed in her hand. The rider crossed two hundred paces. Then one fifty. The bow's warning hum rose sharp. She loosed. The arrow took him in the chest. He fell backward off the horse. The animal veered off the road and stopped. Rebecka turned east. The two riders had paused at the base of the draw. They'd seen the man fall. One pointed toward the ridge. The other pulled a blade. They kicked their horses forward. Rebecka fired twice. The first rider dropped. The second threw himself off his mount and rolled behind a boulder. She could see his boot, his shoulder. Not enough for a clean shot. The crow shrieked once. The man broke from cover and ran upslope. Rebecka shot him before he took three steps. The ridge went silent. She stood at the edge and scanned the compass. The three dots faded. No others appeared. She counted to fifty, then lowered the bow. Aiyana walked to the cave mouth. "It's done." Rebecka looked down at the bodies on the road below. Three men sent to kill her daughter. Three men who would not ride back to report. She tucked the compass away and climbed down toward the cave. The watchcrow followed.

Rebecka reached the cave mouth with the crow on her shoulder. Aiyana waited beside the collapsed crystal shelf, one hand flat on the stone. The bottleneck slot was clear. No fresh tracks. But the refugees had been sealed inside for days now, and the last elixir was gone. No water. No food. Twenty-two people behind the rock, and Ninka among them. "We open it," Rebecka said. "Now. They can't last another night." Aiyana nodded. "The seal will need both of us. Your mother set it from the inside, but the stone remembers her blood in you." Rebecka pressed her palms to the rock where Lark had brought it down. The crystal was cold. She thought of Katia rationing sips from a cup. Ninka's dry mouth. The old man who'd wanted to run. She pushed. The stone gave with a low grinding sound. A hairline seam opened, then widened. Dust fell. Rebecka worked her fingers into the gap and pulled. Aiyana pulled with her. A slab shifted and rolled aside. The smell hit first. Close air. Sweat. Fear kept too long in one place. Katia stood just inside with a knife in her hand. She lowered it when she saw Rebecka's face. "You came back," Katia said. "The riders are dead." Rebecka stepped through. "All of them." Behind Katia the chamber glowed faintly. The crystal walls held a soft light, but the people sitting against them looked hollow. A child cried without sound. A woman held an empty waterskin. Ninka pushed through the crowd. Her hair was matted. Her lips were cracked. She stopped in front of Rebecka. "You took too long," Ninka said. "I know." "The little ones stopped crying yesterday. That's worse." Rebecka put her hand on the back of Ninka's neck and held her there. Ninka let her. Aiyana had already moved deeper into the chamber. She stopped at the far wall and laid both hands on a section of crystal that pulsed brighter than the rest. "Here," she said. "Your ancestor left something for a day like this." The wall opened. Behind it stood a tall wooden cabinet, carved with runes Rebecka couldn't read. Aiyana pulled the doors wide. Inside: jugs of clean water. Bread that steamed. Baskets of fruit. Folded clothes. Herbs tied in bundles. Small bottles glowing pale blue. Rebecka's throat closed. She lifted a jug and passed it to Katia. Katia poured for the nearest child first, then the next, then the next. The chamber came alive with the sound of people drinking. Ninka took bread and ate half before she looked up. "There's a woman," she said. "In the book you found. The third name wasn't the last one." Rebecka held the bow tighter. The quiver hummed against her back. "Eat first," she said. "Then tell me."

Ninka finished the bread and wiped her mouth. The chamber was quiet now. People were sleeping against the crystal walls, or drinking slowly, or holding children who had started to whimper again, which was better than silence. Rebecka crouched in front of her daughter. "Tell me," Rebecka said. "She saw me." Ninka's eyes were wet. "When I was looking for the others. I looked at her by mistake and she looked back. She knows my face now. She's coming." "Where is she?" "South. Riding. Fast." Ninka pressed her hands to her temples. "She's in my head. Right now. She's holding on." Rebecka felt the cold move under her ribs. The bow at her back hummed once and went still. A target too far to read. She looked at Katia. "We hide her," Rebecka said. "Her mind. Before this woman rides another mile." Katia was already moving. She went to the cabinet the ancestor had left and pulled out a wooden box banded in iron. She set it on the stone floor and opened the lid. Inside sat rows of small bottles, corked, glowing faint colors under a haze of runes. A note lay across the top row in her grandmother's hand: for the day the child is seen. "One for her," Katia said. "The rest for the others in this cave. It hides magic from anyone hunting it. Even a scrier looking straight at her won't find the shape of her." Aiyana knelt beside the dark pot they'd used to burn the dolls. She wiped it clean with her sleeve. "We seat the working here. The pot turns the seeing back on the sender for a breath. Long enough to break the thread." Rebecka lifted the small bottle marked with a child's rune. Ninka took it in both hands. "It will hurt her," Ninka whispered. "The woman." "Good," Rebecka said. A grey cat in a patched cape padded out from behind Katia's skirts, wizard hat crooked on his head. He set one paw on the pot's iron foot. The runes on the cauldron flickered green. Aiyana glanced at Rebecka. "He knows the work," Katia said. "Let him." Ninka drank. Aiyana stirred the pot with the wand. The cat pressed both paws to the metal now, ears flat. The air in the chamber thickened, then released with a small hard sound like a snapped string. Ninka gasped. Her hand went to her nose. Blood ran over her lip. "She's gone," Ninka said. "Out of my head. She fell off her horse. I felt it." A tiny black-and-white kitten climbed into her lap and pressed its forehead under her chin. The bleeding slowed. Ninka closed her eyes. Rebecka stood. The bow hummed again, low and steady. The woman was still alive. Still south. But no longer inside her daughter. "Pass the bottles out," Rebecka told Katia. "Every mouth in this cave. Then I ride."

Rebecka tightened the strap on her quiver and looked at the crystal walls. The bottles were passed. Every mouth in the cave had swallowed one. The scrier could not see them now, but the scrier was still out there, on the ground somewhere south, blind and angry. Rebecka did not know her name. She did not know the road. If she rode without both, the woman would climb back on a horse before Rebecka found her. "I need a face," Rebecka said. "And a place. Before she stands up." Katia set the last empty bottle in the box. "Ninka can't look. If she looks, she gets seen again." "I know." Rebecka pulled a small vial from her belt and thumbed the cork loose. Blue light rose out of it and thickened into an eye the size of a fist, gold threads curling at its edges. It hung in the air above the cauldron and turned once, slow, taking in the chamber. "Find the woman who fell," Rebecka told it. "South. Off her horse within the hour." "Working," the eye said. It drifted toward the cave mouth and stopped. "Ditch beside a stone road. Woman, brown coat, blood at the temple. Horse standing ten paces off. She is sitting up." "Name." "She wears a ring. Inside the band: Halvery. Not her given name. A house." "Place." "South fork road. The milestone reads eleven. A low farm to the east with a red gate." Rebecka pulled her map from her coat and marked it. "Anything else." The eye held still. It did not answer. "Speak," Rebecka said. "She is not alone." The eye's pupil narrowed. "A rider is coming down the road toward her. He carries a doll in a leather sleeve. He will reach her in twenty minutes." Rebecka's hand closed on the map. "Another student." "He wears the same knot at his belt as the woman in the gray coat wore. I did not tell you when I first saw him at the inn. I was deciding." Rebecka looked up. The gold threads around the eye's rim flickered. "Deciding what," she said. "Whether you needed the weight. You did. I was wrong to hold it." She did not answer that. Later, maybe. Not now. "Aiyana," Rebecka called. The spectral figure stepped from the wall. "Between-road. Milestone eleven, red gate. Twenty minutes." Aiyana nodded and lifted her hand. The air split open in a ring of runes, spinning slow, its middle a churn of pale light. Rebecka slung her bow and stepped through with the eye trailing behind her. The portal closed. In the cave, Katia set her hand on Ninka's head. The child was breathing evenly. The scrier had a name now, and a road, and twenty minutes.

The portal closed behind Rebecka and the road took shape under her boots. Gray stone, a milestone with a chipped eleven, a red gate down the slope. The eye drifted at her shoulder, its gold threads dim. Aiyana stood a pace behind, quiet as smoke. Twenty minutes, and one of those minutes was already gone. "Where is she," Rebecka whispered. "Ditch. Forty paces ahead. On her knees now." Rebecka crouched behind the low wall along the road. She could not see Halvery from here. She could not see if the woman held a knife, a wand, a doll of her own. A wrong step would put Rebecka in the open. If Halvery was armed and scried her a second time, she could signal south before Rebecka closed the gap. "Tell me what she has in her hands," Rebecka said. "Nothing. Blood on her fingers. A small mirror in her coat pocket. Unused." "Traps around her." The eye turned. "None I see. She is hurt. She is not ready." Rebecka set an arrow to the string. The bow hummed once against her palm, low, a warning she hated. Close enough to kill. The air behind her rippled and Lark stepped through a seam Aiyana held open. His wings were dim, folded tight. He had ridden the seam from the cave on Aiyana's call. He carried his sword low so it would not catch light. "Mirror," Rebecka said to him. "In her coat. She breaks it, she signals." "I take the mirror," Lark said. "You take her." "Fast." He went over the wall without sound. His wings opened once, a single beat, and shut. He crossed the road in three strides and dropped into the ditch. Rebecka rose with the wall at her hip and drew. Halvery lifted her head. Her hand went to her pocket. Lark's hand was already there. He caught her wrist and pulled the mirror free and crushed it under his heel in one motion. The glass cracked flat, no light, no sound beyond stone on stone. Rebecka loosed. The arrow took Halvery through the throat. She fell back into the ditch grass and did not move. Lark knelt and searched her coat. He held up a folded paper and a small iron ring. "Names," he said. "Three. And a seal." "The other rider," Rebecka said to the eye. "Two bends north. He heard nothing. He is still coming." Rebecka took the paper and tucked it under her belt. She looked down the road where a rider she could not yet see was carrying a doll of her daughter in a leather sleeve. Halvery would not stand up again. The signal had not gone out. But the road was not empty, and the quiver at her back was lighter by one arrow. "Reload the string," she told Lark. "He arrives in twelve minutes."

Lark restrung the bow and passed it back. Rebecka slid the paper under her belt and looked past Halvery's body to the red gate at the bottom of the slope. A man stood there. He had come out of the farmhouse while she was killing the scrier. He held a pitchfork in one hand and the reins of a saddled horse in the other. He had seen everything. "He rides, we lose the road," Lark said. "Nearest town is an hour. Armed men back here before the second rider even arrives." The eye drifted to Rebecka's shoulder. "He counts three of you now. He counts a body." Rebecka stepped over the wall and walked down the slope with her bow lowered. The bow did not hum. The farmer was not a target the arrows would take. He was a man with a family behind him and a dead woman in his ditch. He swung up into the saddle when she was still twenty paces off. He kicked the horse and it lunged onto the road heading south. Rebecka raised her hand and her daughter's voice came into her head, clear as a bell struck in the next room. "Mama. Wait." She stopped. "I see him," Ninka said. "I can go to him. I can show him the gray coat woman. The list. Me on the list." "He'll think it's a trick." "He won't. I'll show him what I look like. A kid." Rebecka watched the horse gather speed. The farmer's back was flat to the wind. Her fingers touched the fletching. The bow stayed quiet. "Do it," she said. The horse broke stride fifty paces down the road. The farmer jerked in the saddle like he had been struck. He reined in hard. He sat still. Then he turned his head and looked back up the slope at Rebecka. He held there for a long breath. He lifted one hand, palm out. Then he turned the horse and walked it back through the red gate and into the yard and did not come out. "He saw me," Ninka said. "He has a daughter. She's seven." "Get out of his head, Ninka." "I'm out." Rebecka let the breath go. "Thank you." "Second rider," Lark said. "Nine minutes." Rebecka walked back up the slope. Aiyana held the seam open a hand's width, waiting. The eye turned north along the road toward the bend where the man with the doll would come. "Close the road here," Rebecka told Lark. "We take him in the ditch, same as her. Then we ride for the cave. The farmer keeps his mouth shut for one day. That's all I need." She set an arrow to the string and knelt behind the wall. The red gate stayed shut behind her. The road north stayed empty. For nine minutes, it was hers.

Rebecka knelt behind the low stone wall with an arrow on the string. The ditch ran along the road for thirty paces, then ended at a stand of alders. Nine minutes. She looked at the ditch again and knew it wouldn't hold three of them. It was a shallow scrape, knee-deep at best. One archer could crouch there. Not three. Not without a head showing over the lip. Lark crouched beside her, wings folded tight against his back. Aiyana stood at the seam she had opened between here and the cave, arrow already nocked. Her ghost-quiet had a weight to it. She was Rebecka's ancestor, and she did not waste breath. Rebecka had learned to read her by the set of her jaw. "The ditch is too shallow," Rebecka said. "He'll see us before he's in range." "Then we split," Aiyana said. "You in the ditch. Me in the alders. Lark on the road behind him." "He hears wings, he runs." "He doesn't hear them." Lark flexed one hand. "I can walk. I'm tired, not broken." Rebecka looked north toward the bend. "Seven minutes now." The eye drifted over her shoulder and turned its pale iris on her. "He carries the doll in his left saddlebag. He rides a bay with a white sock." "Can he scry?" "No. He reads the doll, not the road." Rebecka pointed Aiyana to the alders and Lark to a hedge fifty paces past the bend. "He passes you. You close the road behind him. I take the shot. If I miss, Aiyana takes the second. Lark keeps him from turning back." "You will not miss," Aiyana said. They moved. Rebecka slid into the ditch and pressed her shoulder to the dirt wall. She set three arrows in the grass beside her knee. The bow warmed under her hand and stayed quiet. Not yet in range. Hoofbeats came around the bend. The bay walked, then trotted. The rider was hooded, one hand on the reins, one on the saddlebag. He was reading it the way Lark had said. His head was down. The bow hummed. Kill shot. Rebecka rose to one knee and loosed. The arrow took him under the collarbone and drove him sideways off the horse. He hit the road and did not move. The bay skittered and stopped ten paces on. Aiyana was already at the body. She cut the saddlebag free and pulled out the doll. It had Ninka's hair braided into its chest. Aiyana broke its neck with her thumbs and threw the pieces into the ditch. "Ride," she said. Lark caught the bay's reins. Rebecka took the paper from her belt and the reins from Lark and swung up. The road behind them stayed empty. The red gate stayed shut. She turned the horse south toward the cave and kicked hard.

Rebecka rode the bay south until the sun cleared the ridge. The doll's pieces lay behind her in the ditch, but Ninka's hair was still in her coat pocket. She had cut it from the doll's chest before Aiyana broke the neck. A braid the length of her finger, tied at both ends with red thread. As long as it stayed whole, any student left alive could find a new pot, a new wax body, and start again. She reined in at a bend and pulled the braid out. It was warm. Not from her pocket. Warm the way a coal is warm under ash. She swore under her breath and closed her fist around it. Lark caught up on foot, breathing hard. "Something's reading it," she said. "Then burn it here." "Open flame on the road. A rider a mile off sees the smoke." She looked at the sky. "And I won't burn my daughter's hair in a ditch. It has to be done right." Aiyana rode up beside her. "The cave is half a day. That's half a day for someone to latch on." Rebecka slid down and led the bay off the road into a fold of dry ground behind a stand of scrub. She pulled her pack open and took out the small dark pot her mother had pressed on her before she rode out, wrapped in oilcloth. The runes on its belly were the same ones Katia had used before, when they burned the three dolls. Rebecka had not expected to need it again. She set the pot on flat stone. She broke a stick for the wand. Aiyana struck the fire inside with flint so the flame stayed low and hid in the pot's mouth. Lark stood watch on the rise. Rebecka laid the braid on her palm. "I name what this is," she said. "My daughter's hair. Taken to bind her. I take it back." She dropped the braid into the pot. The flame turned white and climbed the inside of the wall. It did not rise past the rim. She stirred once. Her hand seized. A pain ran up her arm to her jaw and locked her teeth. She kept stirring. The white light went out. The pot was empty except for a smear of ash. She sat down hard. Aiyana put a hand on her shoulder. "Anyone holding a thread of her just felt that cord snap," Rebecka said. "They know she's not reachable from a distance now." "Then they come themselves," Aiyana said. "Let them." She wrapped the pot back in the oilcloth and stowed it. Her arm still shook. She swung up onto the bay and turned the horse toward the ridge. Whatever came for Ninka next would have to walk to her door.

The ash of the burned braid was still under Rebecka's nails when the bay smelled the wolves and balked. She reined in on the low ground below the ridge. The ritual smoke had thinned above the scrub, but it had already done its work. Shapes moved in the dry grass a hundred paces out. Long backs. Yellow eyes. Carrion wolves, drawn by the smell of burned hair and blood magic. She counted seven before she stopped counting. Lark came up the slope with his sword drawn. The runes on the blade held a pale blue light. "They won't cross the sigil line while I'm holding this," he said. "But I can't hold it and ride." Aiyana slid down beside them. "Then we don't ride yet." Rebecka looked at the ridge. The cave was an hour up that trail. Ninka was in it. Every minute she sat here was a minute a rider on foot could close from the coast road. "We can't wait them out. Something sent them. Something wants us pinned." She pulled her pack down and set the charmed teepee stakes into the dirt in a tight ring. The cloth unfolded itself around the frame, runes waking blue along the seams. It was small shelter, but it broke line of sight and it held the horse. She led the bay inside and tied him short. "Lark. Walk the sigil out to twenty paces and hold it. Aiyana, my left." Rebecka drew her bow and set six star-forged arrows point-down in the dirt at her feet. The pack came in a rush. Rebecka's bow hummed against her palm and marked the lead animal in her sight. The kill-warning ran up her wrist. She hated it and shot anyway. The wolf dropped mid-stride. She had the next arrow nocked before the body hit. Two more fell in the grass. The bow read each one as flesh and appetite and named the shot. Four wolves broke left toward Aiyana. She stepped into them with a short blade and took the first through the throat. The second she killed with a stone from the ground. The last two turned on Lark's blue line and would not cross it. Rebecka put an arrow through the near one's chest. The last wolf ran. She lowered the bow. Her hands shook. Lark's sword dimmed. He sat down where he stood. "That wasn't a hungry pack. They came straight in." "Someone drove them." Rebecka pulled the arrows from the bodies and wiped them clean. She whistled and her crow dropped from the pines to her wrist. She whispered the cave's name to it and sent it up the trail to warn Katia. She swung onto the bay. The path was open now. Whoever had turned the wolves was already close enough to do it by hand.

Rebecka rode the bay up the ridge trail with the wolf blood still tacky on her sleeves. The crow had not come back. She had sent it to the cave an hour ago with the warning in her own voice, and the sky above the pines held nothing but wind. Without the crow's return, she could not know if Katia had heard her. Her mother might already be leading the refugees out onto open stone, walking straight into whoever had driven the wolves. She reined in below the last switchback. Aiyana climbed up beside her. Lark caught up on foot, still gray from the sigil work. "The crow should be back," Rebecka said. "Katia sends it back. Always." "Then something took it," Aiyana said. Rebecka slid down and pulled the stakes from her pack again. She drove them into the dirt off the trail and let the charmed cloth unfold. The runes woke blue along the seams. She needed one quiet minute out of sight of the ridge. Inside, she opened the small vial she carried against her ribs and tipped a drop onto her thumb. She pressed the thumb to her forehead and shut her eyes. "Ninka." Her daughter answered fast. The girl's voice came behind Rebecka's eyes, not in the air. Mom. "Is Gran with you. Is the cave sealed." Gran is here. The bear is at the mouth. We heard your crow. Gran kept everyone back. Rebecka's knees loosened. She put a hand on the tent pole. "The crow came through." It came at dawn. It's on Gran's shoulder. It won't leave her. "Tell her not to send it. Tell her to hold the seal until I'm at the mouth." She will. Mom. "What." Someone walked past the outer crack an hour ago. A woman. She didn't find the door. She's still on the ridge. Rebecka opened her eyes. "One," she said aloud. "On the ridge. She missed the seal." Lark lifted his head. Aiyana already had her blade out. Rebecka stepped out of the tent and pulled the stakes. She nocked a star-forged arrow and started up on foot. The bay she left tied. The trail bent through scrub and opened onto flat stone above the cave mouth. The woman was crouched at the crack, running a bare hand along the seam. She wore a dark coat. No hood. Rebecka's bow hummed and marked her. The kill-warning ran up Rebecka's wrist. The woman heard the string draw and turned. Rebecka loosed. The arrow took her under the collarbone and put her flat on the stone. Rebecka walked to the body. A small iron seal lay in the woman's palm, the same knot as the paper from Halvery's coat. She closed her hand around it. The cave was still sealed. Ninka was still hidden. But the knot had sent another one, and that one had found the door.

Rebecka pocketed the iron seal and looked down at the dead woman on the flat stone. Two searchers now, both carrying the same knot. Neither had wandered onto the ridge by luck. Someone was feeding them the cave's location, and until she found the leak, the refugees below her feet were only as safe as the next hour. She waved Lark and Aiyana up. Lark knelt by the body and turned out the coat. A folded map fell into his palm. He opened it on the stone. The ridge was drawn in charcoal. A small cross marked the crack behind Rebecka's boot. A second cross marked the collapsed bottleneck. A dotted line ran off the west edge of the paper toward the coast road. "She didn't guess this," Rebecka said. "Someone drew it for her." "Then someone stood here," Aiyana said. "Or watched from close." Rebecka thought of the crow that had gone through at dawn. Of the refugees at the panicked man's back. Of every face in the deep chamber she had counted and turned away from. She pulled the stakes and set the charmed cloth again in the scrub off the trail. Inside, she tipped the last drop from the vial onto her thumb and pressed it to her forehead. "Ninka. I need you." Her daughter answered at once. Mom. "Someone in the cave has been sending word out. I need you to look. Not into their heads. Only their hands. Show me who has touched paper today." A pause. Then the girl's voice thinned. Gran. The bear. A boy with a bandaged foot. And the man who wanted to run. He has ink on his fingers. Rebecka's jaw tightened. "The panicked one." He's sitting near the back crack. He keeps looking at the seam. "Tell Gran to hold him. Don't let him touch the wall. I'm coming down." She broke the tent and went at a run. Lark and Aiyana followed. The bottleneck opened for her when Katia's voice hummed on the other side of the seal. Rebecka squeezed through. The man was already on his feet, one hand at the crack. A folded square of birch bark sat between his fingers. Rebecka's bow hummed and marked him. She did not draw. "Show me," she said. He held the bark out because the bear behind him left him no other choice. Charcoal marks. The ridge. A cross at the seam. A time. Tonight. "Who," she said. "A woman on the coast road. She said if I marked the door my daughter would eat." Rebecka took the bark and burned it in the pot Katia carried. The seam went dark. She set two of Aiyana's arrows across the crack and posted Lark beside it. The leak was closed. But the woman on the coast road knew the ridge, and she was still out there, and now she would come herself.

The crack was sealed, but the traitor had spoken to more than one person. Rebecka watched the panicked man from across the chamber. He sat where the bear had put him, hands flat on his knees. He would not meet her eyes. Somewhere in the room, someone else knew what he had done, and that person could open a new seam the moment she slept. She crouched beside him. "Who else did you tell." "No one." "You told someone. You needed someone to watch when you were asleep. Who." His mouth worked. "I don't know their names. Two men. A woman with a burn on her wrist. I said my girl would eat if they helped me mark the wall." Three faces. Twenty-two people in the chamber. Rebecka could not shoot on a guess, and she could not leave three strangers loose against a sleeping child. She went to Katia at the ancestor's cabinet. The doors stood open. Bread, jars, folded cloth, glowing bottles. Katia was already pulling a small clay dish from the lower shelf. "Ninka can look at hands," Rebecka said. "She can't look into a lie." "Then don't ask her to." Katia set the dish down. "Ask the cat." The healer kitten sat on the top shelf, tail curled over its paws. Its markings pulsed faint blue in the crystal light. Katia lifted it down. "It purrs on the sick," Katia said. "It goes quiet on the hidden sick. Guilt is a sickness. Carry it through the room." Rebecka took the kitten in both hands. Its purr started at once, soft against her fingers. She walked the chamber. She stopped at each refugee and let the kitten sniff. Purr. Purr. Purr. An old woman. A boy with a bandaged foot. A mother holding twins. At the third man against the wall, the purr cut off. The kitten went still. The man looked at his boots. "Stand up," Rebecka said. He stood. She moved on. Two rows further, the kitten quieted again beside a lean man with a scabbed knuckle. Then once more, at a woman scratching a red welt on her inner wrist. Three. She had her three. The bear moved without being asked. It herded them into the front chamber, away from the sealed seam and away from Ninka. Lark set the protective ring across the arch behind them, a luminous disc of layered light that hummed when the woman with the burn tried to step back through. Rebecka did not kill them. She bound their wrists with cord from the chest and set Marcus at the arch with two arrows nocked. "Sleep in shifts," she told Katia. "I'll take the first." She sat with the kitten in her lap and watched the four bound figures breathe. The cave was tight again. But the woman on the coast road was still riding, and she knew the door, and she would arrive before dawn.

Rebecka watched the four bound figures until the kitten in her lap began to purr again. The guilt in the room had settled. But the woman on the coast road had promised food to more than she could see. The traitor had named three. The coast-road woman had baited others outside these walls, and Rebecka did not know how many. If even one of them reached the water stores at the spring above the cave, the refugees would drink poison by morning. She knelt by Katia at the ancestor's cabinet. "How many did she buy." "More than three." Katia did not look up from folding a cloth. "She feeds a net. She always feeds a net." "I need the number." "Then ask the man again. He'll know one more than he told you." Rebecka crossed to the panicked man. She crouched. "Who watched the spring for her." His face broke. "A drover. Wall-eyed. He waters horses at the seep above the mouth. She told him to drop a stone in the pool when her rider knocked." "One drover. No one else." "No one else. I swear on my girl." She rose. One man at the spring. One woman still riding. If the drover dropped his stone before the rider arrived, the poison would already be in the water. She could not wait for dawn. She took the compass from her belt and asked it for hostile life above the cave mouth. The needle steadied north-northeast, close, one point only. She took six arrows and the bow and told Marcus to hold the arch. Katia caught her sleeve at the bottleneck. "Take the cat." "For what." "For after. So you know you got them all." Rebecka slid the kitten inside her jacket and climbed through the slot. Cold pressed her face. The moon put the ridge in gray. She moved along the shelf above the mouth until she smelled horses. The drover crouched at the edge of the seep pool. A small clay jar sat open beside his knee. He held a folded paper packet over the water. She put the arrow through his wrist first. The packet dropped on the stone, not the pool. He gasped and reached for a knife. She put the second arrow through his throat. She waited. Nothing moved on the slope. She pulled the packet from the wet stone. Gray powder. Dry. She burned it with the flint from her pouch and watched the ash blow off the ridge. She carried the kitten past the two picketed horses, past the empty bedroll, past a satchel with no second cup and no second blanket. One man's kit. The kitten purred against her ribs the whole way. She went back down to the slot. The water was clean. The net above the cave was empty. Below her, the woman on the coast road was still riding, and she was riding alone now.

Rebecka came back down through the slot with the kitten still purring under her jacket. The spring was safe. The drover was dead. But the woman on the coast road was riding fast, and three bound refugees in the front chamber still knew things Rebecka did not. She had hours until dawn and no map of what was coming. Marcus stood at the arch with an arrow nocked. The three traitors sat against the wall, wrists cord-bound, eyes low. He gave her one flat look. "They won't talk," he said. "I asked twice." "I know." "Third time won't help." She crouched in front of the oldest of the three, a lean man with a split lip. "How many riders. What roads. What signal." He stared at the floor. She tried the woman next. Then the boy. Nothing. The kitten stayed silent in her jacket, which told her only what she already knew. All three were guilty. None were speaking. Katia came to the arch with a small vial. The liquid inside caught the lamp and held it, gold layered under a thin blue line. "Your grandmother left this in the cabinet with the bread." "What does it do." "Three drops on the tongue. They will answer what you ask. Only what you ask. It costs them a day of sleep and it costs you an honest question." Rebecka took the vial. "Meaning." "Meaning ask what you need. Not what you want." Marcus lowered the bow. "Do it." She tipped the man's chin up and put three drops on his tongue. His eyes glazed. She asked the plain questions. How many. What roads. What signal. The answers came in a dull, even voice, like a man reading a list he did not care about. Four more on the coast-road woman's payroll. Two riding with her tonight. One waiting at the milestone with fresh horses. The signal was a single lamp lit in the north window of an empty shepherd's hut on the ridge road. If the lamp went dark before the moon crossed the notch, the woman would turn back and try again in a week. Rebecka gave the drops to the other two. Their answers matched. No one lied under the gold. She corked the vial and gave it to Katia. Two swallows left. "Marcus. The hut on the ridge road. I need the lamp out before moonset." "Go." He was already pulling a potion off his belt. "I hold here." She looked at the three bound figures. The boy had started to cry. "They stay tied," she said. "They stay alive." Marcus nodded once. She took six arrows and the compass and stepped back into the cold. She knew the count now. She knew the road. She knew the lamp. The woman on the coast road was still coming, but she was coming toward a trap Rebecka could set.

Rebecka left the cave with six arrows, the compass, and the count in her head. Two riders with the woman. One at the milestone with horses. A lamp in a shepherd's hut she had to snuff before moonset. She took the ridge path on foot and the cold cut through her jacket. The hut sat where the captives said. One window on the north side, one yellow lamp inside. She crossed the last fifty paces low and put an arrow through the base of the flame. The lamp fell. The oil caught the sill and then died on stone. The window went dark. She counted to sixty and nothing moved on the road. She climbed above the coast road and lay flat in the heather. The compass warmed. Three dots, close together, riding hard from the north. The woman and her two riders. She strung the bow and set five arrows point-down in the dirt. Then the trouble. She raised the magical eye and looked. Three riders at a hard gallop, cloaks up, hoods drawn. All three the same shape in the dark. She could not tell the woman from the men. If she shot the wrong one first, the leader would turn her horse into the trees and be gone before Rebecka nocked again. She pulled the small vial from her jacket. A coiled length of braided cord lay beside it in the pocket, runes stitched along its length, the binding rope her grandmother had left in the cabinet. She had not known what to do with it until now. She dropped the vial into a puddle under a flat stone. Old water. The gold and blue caught. She spoke her daughter's name over it and asked for eyes that were not hers. The puddle showed a woman with mocha skin and braided hair, jellyfish shells at her collar, a green tail curled in a coral hall far from any road. A tide-witch her grandmother had bargained with once. The woman looked up from her shell chamber and listened. "The center rider," Rebecka said. "Which one leads." The tide-witch tilted her head. Water carried voice a long way. "The one on the left. Shorter stirrup. Right hand free of the rein." The puddle went dark. Rebecka set the binding rope in a loop across the road under a scatter of leaves, the free end tied to a birch. Then she climbed back to her line and waited. They came around the bend at speed. Rebecka watched the stirrups. Left rider, short. Right hand loose. She drew and shot. The woman took the arrow through the throat and went off the horse. The other two hauled reins. Their mounts hit the rope loop. Both animals went down in the leaves. Rebecka put an arrow into each rider before they cleared the saddle. Three dead. One left at the milestone with fresh horses, waiting for a signal that would not come.

Rebecka dragged the three bodies off the coast road and into the ditch. She pulled her arrows free and wiped them on the woman's cloak. Four dead now on this road, counting the lamp-hut work. One rider left at the milestone with fresh horses. She meant to be there before he stopped waiting. She stepped back onto the road and the bow hummed low against her palm. Not a target lock. A warning she had learned to trust. The compass in her jacket warmed, then went hot. She pulled it out. Six dots moved fast up the coast road from the south. Not riders. The dots ran close to the ground and spread wide across the verge. Carrion wolves. The blood on the leaves had called them. She had killed too many in one place. She counted her arrows. Four. Not enough for six wolves and the milestone rider both. If she stayed here to fight, the last rider would hear the noise, mount, and be gone before she reached him. If she ran for the milestone, the wolves would pull her down on the open road. She stepped off the road into the birch and pressed her back to a trunk. She turned the wolf pendant at her throat between two fingers. Storm's grandfather had put a talisman like it on Storm's wrist the night he died. Storm had given hers to her the winter after her father passed. He had said only, "Call once. Don't call twice." She pressed the pendant to her mouth and said his name. The wolves crested the rise. Six of them, ribs showing, mouths black with old kill. The lead wolf caught her scent and turned into the birch. Something came down the ridge behind her fast and quiet. She did not turn. A black wolf the size of a horse broke past her shoulder and hit the lead carrion wolf in the throat. Storm Nightwolf took two of them before the pack understood what had come. Rebecka put arrows into two more. The last two ran south and did not stop. Storm stood over the bodies, red eyes on her, chest working. He did not shift back. He tipped his head once toward the coast road, north, toward the milestone. Go. "The rider," she said. "Fresh horses. He'll bolt when I show." Storm ran. She followed at the best pace her legs would give. She found the milestone in gray light. Storm had already been there. The rider lay in the grass with his throat opened. Two saddled horses stood tied to the post, calm, waiting for a signal that would not come. Storm was gone back up the ridge. Rebecka took the reins of the nearest horse. The coast-road network was closed. The quiver still hung at her back, four arrows lighter, and the ridge road home lay open.

Rebecka mounted the fresh horse at the milestone and pushed it hard up the ridge road. The second horse ran on a lead beside her. She would trade when the first tired. She had to reach the cave before dawn. Three traitors sat bound at the arch under Marcus's guard. If she came late, someone inside would cut them loose or die trying, and the sealed crack would open again. The first horse blew out at the second bend. She swung to the second and rode. That one lasted a mile before its head dropped and its stride broke. She dismounted and led it. The sky over the ridge was already turning gray at the edge. She was going to be late. She pulled the ring off her thumb and held it in her palm. White gold, dragon claws around a pastel stone. Marcus had given it to her the winter Ninka turned six. He had told her the stone was a call, once, and only if there was no other road. She had carried it four years without using it. She pressed her thumb into the stone and said, "I need you now." The stone warmed. A wind came down the ridge that did not belong to the ridge. The horse shied and she let it go. Wings opened above the pines. The dragon came down onto the road in front of her, white scales laced with pale rainbow, smoke curling from her nostrils in soft ribbons. The smoke reached Rebecka's face and her chest loosened a notch she had not known was tight. The dragon lowered her shoulder. Rebecka climbed on. She gripped the ridge behind the neck and said, "The crystal caves. The ridge cave. Before the sun." The dragon went up. The ridge road fell away under them. Rebecka saw the shepherd's hut with its dark lamp, the milestone with the dead rider, the coast road empty. Wind cut her eyes. The dragon's smoke kept curling back over her shoulders and her hands stayed steady on the reins of scale. The cave mouth showed below in the first gray light. The collapsed crystal shelf. The narrow slot. Marcus at the arch, bow up, the three bound shapes behind him. He heard the wings and stepped out with an arrow drawn, then lowered it when he saw her. The dragon set down on the shelf above the slot. Rebecka slid off. The stone in the ring had gone dull. The dragon met her eye once, then lifted and was gone over the ridge. Marcus caught her arm. "They tried the cord an hour ago. I stopped them." "How many hours have we bought?" "Enough." He looked at her face. "You're here." She walked past him into the cave. The quiver hummed against her back. The traitors watched her come and looked away.

Rebecka stepped past Marcus into the cave. The air inside was sour with sweat and old smoke. Someone was shouting near the back. A woman answered, higher, sharper. The refugees had been sealed under stone for days. She could feel it now, the way a stretched rope feels before it snaps. Katia met her at the inner arch. Her mother's gray hair was pinned up in a loose knot. She held the healer kitten against her chest. The kitten's eyes were half shut. Katia looked at Rebecka's face and did not smile. "They will break before noon," Katia said. "The man in the blue coat has a knife hidden in his boot. The woman with the baby wants to run for the trees. If one goes, they all go." "How long do I have?" "An hour. Maybe less." Rebecka walked into the main chamber. Twenty-two faces turned toward her. The bound traitors sat against the wall. A man in a blue coat was on his feet, arguing with a thin woman who clutched a child. Two others stood behind him. The rest watched, ready to pick a side. "Sit down," Rebecka said. The man in the blue coat did not sit. "We're dying in here. My daughter hasn't seen sun in six days." "You'll see sun," Rebecka said. "Not today." "You said three days. It's been six." She felt the room lean toward him. She could shoot him. The bow would tell her when the shot would kill. She did not want the warning. She set the bow down on the stone. "The riders who wanted your children are dead," she said. "I killed the woman on the coast road. I killed her scrier. I killed the men she sent. There is no one left to signal. No one left to come." The man's mouth opened. He did not speak. "I have a way out," Rebecka said. "Not on foot. Not tonight. A crawler is coming up the pass. Crystal-plated. Cloaked. It carries food, beds, and a stove that cooks. It fits all of you. Two days and you sleep in your own homes." Katia stepped up beside her. "She is telling you the truth. I have seen it." The room settled a notch. The thin woman sat down. The child pushed her face into her mother's shoulder. The man in the blue coat looked at the knife in his boot, then at Rebecka's bow on the stone, and lowered himself to the ground. Marcus came in from the arch. "Crawler at the slot. Lark's with it." Rebecka picked up her bow. "Load the children first. Then the wounded. The bound three ride with me." Katia touched her wrist as she passed. "You did not need me to say it." "I did," Rebecka said. "They needed to hear you." She walked out to meet the crawler. The quiver hummed against her back. The riot did not come.

The crawler took the refugees down the pass at first light. Rebecka watched it go from the ridge, three bound prisoners chained inside a rear compartment, Katia at the front with the healer kitten in her lap. Marcus stood beside her on the stone. The homestead waited at the end of the road, and only three of its eight wards still held. She could not put twenty-two people back inside a house that would not keep them. "Five wards down," Marcus said. "We can rebuild two by nightfall if we ride now. Not the other three. Not in a day." "Then we don't rebuild them," Rebecka said. "We replace them." She uncorked a small vial from her coat and poured the contents onto the flat stone. The liquid pulled itself upward and opened into a floating eye, blue at the center, gold threads shivering around the rim. Oculus Omnivident turned once and settled at her shoulder. "The homestead," Rebecka said. "Show me what's left." "Three wards hold. The north fence line is open. The kitchen wall is open. The root cellar is open. No riders within a day." "Anyone watching the gaps?" "No." "The fae. Are they still in the hollow?" "Yes. Lark's people. Two hours by the between-road." Marcus looked at her. "You want fae wards on our walls." "I want the hollow itself," Rebecka said. "Their sigil-weavers can lay a living dome over the house. Mushroom light. Flower thread. It holds as long as the growth holds. Lark said so once." "They'll ask a price." "They always do." She sent Lark ahead through the between-road with her crow and a folded promise. He came back before the sun cleared the ridge. Behind him walked four of the fae, wings folded tight, arms full of what looked like woven roots and glass. One carried a small carved chest strapped across her chest. She set it down on the stone and opened it. Inside, twelve potions stood in rune-marked slots, breath curling from two of the corks. "Veilkeepers," Lark said. "One for each waking mind in your house. Drink at dusk. The sigils won't take unless the drinkers are hidden from scriers." "Price?" Rebecka asked. The fae with the chest looked up. "Ninka comes to the hollow one day each spring. She learns from us. That is the price." Rebecka's jaw tightened. She thought of the burned braid, the cave, six days without sun. One day a year in a village of glowing mushrooms was not a wound. "Done," she said. Oculus drifted closer. "The kitchen wall took root already. The dome is forming. Your home is holding." Rebecka let out a breath she had carried since the ridge. The homestead had walls again. But her daughter now had a debt in the fae hollow, and Rebecka did not yet know what a year of fae lessons would teach a ten-year-old who could already move minds across a mountain.

The dome held through the night. Rebecka slept two hours on the kitchen floor and woke to Marcus shaking her shoulder. A man stood outside the sigil-line at the north fence. He carried no weapon and would not come closer. "He says he has word of the quiver," Marcus said. "He asked for you by name." Rebecka pulled her boots on. The star-forged arrows were already on her back. Her bow read the man before she cleared the porch. Flesh. Bone. One knife at his hip, sheathed. No mage-signature. The bow gave her no death-warning. He was too far, or he was nothing. He was thin, sunburned, wearing a courier's coat with the seal cut off. He kept his hands open at his sides. "I rode nine days," he said. "I know where the rest of the star-forged shafts went. The ones your father didn't cache. I can name the man who has them." Rebecka did not lower the bow. Too many strangers had come with gifts this month. Two had carried her daughter's hair in dolls. "Name him now." "Not through a fence. Let me sit. Give me water. I'll tell you everything." Aiyana stepped out of the air beside Rebecka. The beaded pendant at her throat caught the morning light. She looked at the man the way she looked at everything, without hurry. "He came alone," Aiyana said. "I walked his back-trail an hour. No second rider. No mark cut on any tree." "That only means he's careful." "It means he's alone." Rebecka lowered the bow one inch. "Bring him in. Not past the second door." Marcus opened a gap in the sigil-line. The man walked through and sat where Rebecka pointed, on a bench inside the greenhouse wall, between glowing beds of herbs. He watched the light in the growing rack and swallowed. Rebecka set a small vial on the table. The glass was polished, the liquid gold and blue. She uncorked it. "Three drops," she said. "Then you talk." He looked at the vial. "Truth serum." "Yes." "I came here to help you." "Then it costs you nothing." He held out his tongue. Rebecka counted the drops. His shoulders eased in a way no liar's ever did. "Who has the arrows?" "A man in the salt town at the river mouth. Calls himself a broker. Twelve shafts in a locked case. He's selling them at the end of the month to a buyer coming down from the north." "Who sent you to me?" "No one. My sister was a courier for the gray-coat woman. You killed the woman. My sister ran. She told me if I ever needed a debt paid, ride to your gate and speak plain." Rebecka corked the vial. Aiyana met her eyes. "End of the month," Aiyana said. "That gives you eleven days." Rebecka set the bow against the bench. "Marcus. Ready the horses."

They rode two days to the salt town at the river mouth. Marcus stayed at the homestead with Ninka and Katia under the fae dome. Aiyana rode with Rebecka as far as the last ridge, then went ahead on foot to scout the streets. She came back at dusk with a face like set stone. "The broker keeps a shop above a salt warehouse. Two guards at the stair. He will not open the door for a stranger. He is waiting for a northern buyer. Word is the buyer wears a red cord at the wrist and carries a broken coin cut on the diagonal. The broker matches the cord to the coin. No match, no door." Rebecka had no red cord. She had no coin. She had eleven days shrinking to nine. "We could take the shop by force," Aiyana said. "You would lose half the arrows to the fire he would set before he let us in." "Then I need the buyer's tokens before the buyer arrives." They camped outside the town in a shelter Aiyana raised from a bundle she carried — a small teepee stitched with charm patterns, its runes glowing soft blue at the seams. Inside the air went quiet. Rebecka's shoulders dropped for the first time in a week. A man's voice spoke from the flap. "Rebecka Evertrue. Don't shoot. I know your name from a manifest." Rebecka had an arrow on the string before he finished. Aiyana lifted the flap one inch. He stood in the sand with his hands open. Thin, sunburned, a courier's cloak with the seal torn off at the shoulder. Not the courier from the gate. A different one. His eyes moved like a man who had run a long way and did not intend to run again. "Who are you." "Thunder Darkwolf. I read the manifests I carry. Three couriers before me took the main road to your gate to warn you. All three are dead. I came the back roads." "Warn me of what." "Your name is on a death list under a line about a quiver. The northern buyer is the one who put it there. He is four days out, not eleven. The broker moved the sale." Rebecka lowered the bow one inch. "Why tell me." "Because I know what he'll do with twelve star-forged shafts." He did not blink. "And because I can walk into that shop. I carried for the buyer's house last winter. I know the cord. I know the coin. I have both in my pack." Aiyana looked at Rebecka. Rebecka took a small bottle from her coat — shimmering glass, an eye stamped on the stopper. A gift from Makani, meant to guide a seeker to a lost thing. "Then you walk in as him," Rebecka said. "I follow behind with this. If you lie, it finds the arrows without you. And I find you after." Thunder nodded once. "Fair." The door had a key now. Four days to use it.

Thunder came back to the charmed teepee at moonrise with a folded square of paper. He set it on the sand between them and smoothed it flat. "Shop layout. From memory. I carried a crate up those stairs last winter." Rebecka leaned over the paper. Aiyana held a candle close. Thunder drew as he spoke, short strokes with a burnt stick. "Stair up from the salt floor. Two guards. Door at the top. One room, long. Broker sits at the far wall behind a counter. Iron box under the counter. That's where he keeps small goods. Arrows would be there or in the wall cabinet to his left." "Windows." "One. Shuttered. Drops to the roof of the warehouse next door. A man could reach the alley from there if he moved fast." "Doors." "The stair is the only way in. There is a back panel behind the counter. It looks like wall. It isn't. He uses it when a deal turns." Rebecka studied the square. "He runs through the panel, not the window." "Every time." Aiyana tapped the counter mark. "And the fire? You said he burns the goods if pressed." "Oil jar under his stool. He kicks it and drops a match. The floor is old pine." Rebecka sat back. The blind wall was gone. She could see the room now — the stair, the counter, the false panel, the jar at his foot. She could see where she needed to be before Thunder ever climbed the steps. "You go in as the buyer," she said. "You keep his hands on the counter. You keep him talking about the coin. I want three minutes." "For what." "For me to be on the warehouse roof outside his window. If he reaches for the jar, I put an arrow through his wrist before he touches it. If he runs for the panel, he runs into me." Thunder nodded once. "The guards." "Aiyana takes the stair after you're through the door." Aiyana said, "Done." Rebecka opened her coat and took out the small white-gold compact Makani had pressed into her hand before she rode. She thumbed it open. The mirrored lid caught the candle. Five small tarts sat in the tray, each a different color. "One bite changes your face for an hour. Makani said pick the yellow for a stranger's face. You wear the buyer's face up the stair. The guards won't know you." Thunder looked at the tarts, then at her. "You trust me with this." "I trust the seeker bottle behind you more. But yes. I trust you." He took the yellow tart and wrapped it in cloth. He folded the paper map and slid it to Rebecka. Outside, the salt town slept. Rebecka had a room now, and a wall to stand on, and a shot lined up before the door ever opened. Three days left. In the morning they would move.

At dawn Rebecka crouched at the flap of the charmed teepee and watched the salt town wake. Thunder had gone ahead to the docks. Aiyana slept an hour more. The plan wanted her on the warehouse roof by noon. The streets between here and that roof were the problem. Thunder had counted six strangers on the salt floor last night who did not belong to the town. Watchers. The northern buyer's people, set out early to sweep the streets for anyone who looked like her. She pulled the flap closed and opened her palm. The floating eye rose from the sand where it had rested through the night. Its blue iris turned once, slow, and fixed on her. "How many between here and the warehouse," she said. "Nine." "Show me." The eye drifted to the map on the ground and marked each one with a small point of light. Two at the west gate. One on the roof of the grain house. Three along the salt walk. Two at the alley behind the broker's shop. One inside a doorway across from the warehouse itself. The last point sat exactly where she needed to climb. "He watches the drainpipe I mean to use." "Yes." She thought. The compact sat in her coat pocket. Makani had said one bite, one hour, a stranger's face. Five tarts. She had given the yellow to Thunder. Four left. She took the compact out and thumbed it open. The mirror caught her face — too known, too listed. She chose the green tart and set it on her tongue. The change came fast. Her jaw shortened. Her cheeks filled. Her hair went pale under the hood. She looked in the mirror and did not know herself. Good. "Watch the doorway man," she told the eye. "Tell me if his eyes track me." "I will tell you." She woke Aiyana with a hand on her shoulder. Aiyana looked at the new face and nodded once. "An hour?" "An hour. Follow at a distance. If I fall, you finish it with Thunder." Rebecka stepped out into the salt town wearing a stranger's face and a salt-hauler's coat she had bought off a sleeping man for two coins. She walked past the two at the west gate. Neither turned. She crossed the salt walk between the three watchers. One glanced at her boots and looked away. The eye floated above the rooflines, unseen by anyone but her. Halfway down the alley it spoke in her ear. "The doorway man watches you now." She did not stop. She turned into a cooper's yard, climbed a stack of empty barrels, and dropped onto the warehouse roof from the blind side. When she looked back the doorway man was still watching the drainpipe. She was in position. The face would hold another forty minutes. Thunder had not yet climbed the stair.

Rebecka lay flat on the warehouse roof and counted the problem. The strike would give her twelve star-forged arrows. It would also give her a shop full of dead men, a broker screaming from a rooftop, and every watcher in the salt town running for the drainpipe. Twelve arrows would not fit in her quiver. They would not fit under her coat. If she came down the pipe with a bundle in her arms, she would be caught before the second alley. She needed a way out. A hidden one. Something waiting. She crawled to the roof's rear edge and looked down at the loading yard. A salt-hauler's wagon sat empty by the wall. Too slow. Too seen. The face on her would fade in half an hour and she would be Rebecka Evertrue again, listed and known. She touched the talisman at her wrist and spoke his name once, low. "Storm." The eye dipped near her ear. "He hears." She waited. A minute. Two. Then a shadow moved along the wall of the salt shed below, and a man stepped out of it in soft leather, wrist wrapped in bone and hide. Storm Nightwolf did not look up. He did not need to. He knew where she was. She dropped a pebble. He caught it without turning his head. "Rebecka," the eye said. "He asks what you need." "A door out. Twelve arrows. No chase." The eye carried it. A moment later it came back. "He says the crystal crawler is two streets east, cloaked in an ash lot. He drove it in last night. It will hold one hour of hidden run." She pressed her forehead to the roof. Marcus had sent it. Marcus had sent Storm with it and told neither of them to tell her, because she would have said no. "Tell him thank you." "He says do not thank him yet. Tell him where to bring it." She worked the map in her head. The broker's back panel opened on a narrow lane. Thunder would come out that way with the arrows if the front went bad. She would come off the drainpipe on the far side. "The lane behind the shop," she said. "Nose pointed east. Door open. He waits inside. He does not fight unless I fall." The eye carried it. Storm was already walking. He turned the corner without a nod. Rebecka rolled onto her back and breathed. The problem had a shape now. Twelve arrows, one lane, one cloaked run, one hour. Thunder was climbing the stair below her at last. Aiyana was in her place across the street. She drew her bow across her knees and waited for noon. The way home was parked two streets east with its door open, and no one in the salt town knew it was there.

Noon was ten minutes off. Rebecka lay on the warehouse roof and watched Thunder Darkwolf cross the street below. He wore another man's face and carried the red cord and the broken coin in his fist. He would walk into the broker's shop alone. Once the door shut behind him, she had no way to warn him. If the buyer's men arrived while he stood inside with twelve star-forged arrows on the table, he would die there before she could put a shot through the window. She touched the vial at her throat. The little bottle was warm from her skin. Katia had pressed it into her hand the night she rode out and told her it carried one whisper, one time, into the ear of whoever she named. Rebecka had meant to save it for Ninka. She uncorked it now and spoke Thunder's name and one sentence. "When I send the crow, run for the back panel." The swirl inside the glass went flat. The charm was spent. She pulled the watchcrow from under her coat. Its feathers caught the noon light in cold blue. She stroked its head once. "Wait on the sill above the counter. Do not move until I call you." The crow lifted and slid across the street and settled on a ledge over the broker's door. No one looked up. Thunder went inside. The door shut. Rebecka counted her breath and watched the roofline east. The eye dipped near her ear. "Four riders. Coming up the salt lane. Two minutes." She drew and did not loose. Four was too many to drop from a roof before one reached the door. She needed Thunder out with the arrows, not pinned behind a counter. She reached for the crow with her mind the way Ninka had taught her and pushed one word down the line. Now. Inside the shop the crow shrieked once and knocked a lamp off the sill. Rebecka heard the glass go. She heard the broker shout. She heard the back panel bang open against the lane wall. Thunder came out at a run with the bundle across his chest. Aiyana stepped from the doorway across the street and put two guards down on the stair before they cleared it. The four riders rounded the corner and saw the open panel and the running man and spurred. Rebecka loosed. The lead rider dropped. She loosed again. The second went under his horse. The other two broke and rode for the wide street. A gate of light opened at the lane's mouth, ringed with pale runes. Storm stood inside it with the crawler behind him, one hand on the frame to hold it steady. Marcus had sent more than a vehicle. He had sent a way through. Thunder went through the gate. Aiyana followed. Rebecka came off the drainpipe and stepped through last with the crow on her shoulder and twelve arrows in Thunder's arms. The gate closed. The salt town was behind her.

The gate closed behind them and the crawler's cabin folded around Rebecka in crystal light. Thunder set the bundle on the table between the benches. Twelve arrows spilled from the wrap, red-fletched, star-forged, humming loud enough to feel in her teeth. Aiyana stepped back from the table. Storm braced a hand on the wall and watched the arrows the way a man watches a snake. "They don't know you yet," Aiyana said. Rebecka reached for one. The hum climbed. When her fingers closed on the shaft, the arrow bucked in her grip and slid free, clattering to the floor. She tried a second. The fletching turned in her hand as if the arrow wanted her wrist. Her bow, strapped across her back, gave a low warning note she had never heard from it before. "They were made for a bond," Thunder said. "The broker kept them wrapped in salt cloth so they'd stay quiet. Off the cloth, they choose." She had killed three men on a rooftop to bring these arrows out of that shop. If she could not draw them, she had bought nothing. She knelt on the crawler floor and laid all twelve in a row. The hum flattened into one steady tone. She thought of her brother, seventeen, dead on the floor of the homestead. She thought of Ninka behind the new dome. She spoke to the arrows the way Makani had taught her to speak to bindings, plain and out loud. "I am Rebecka Evertrue. My father hid your kind for me. Someone ran and left you behind. I came and got you back. You are mine now, and you will not harm my people." Nothing moved. The hum held. She pulled the small knife from her boot and cut her left palm across the base of the thumb. She pressed her hand flat over the shafts. Blood ran down the fletching. The arrows drank it. The hum dropped to a low whisper and stopped. A shape formed at the far end of the cabin. A lioness with a coat of stars stood between the bunks, quiet, her breath cool as night air. She was not the ancestor. She was older than that. She walked the row of arrows once, touched each fletching with her nose, and looked at Rebecka. "Draw one," the lioness said. Rebecka drew. The arrow came to her hand steady. She nocked it against her bowstring. The bow did not sound its warning. The arrow sat quiet, waiting. The lioness dimmed and was gone. The pantry cabinet at the cabin's back stood open where it had not been open before. Bread, water, clean cloth, a folded shirt for her cut hand. Rebecka wrapped her palm. She gathered the arrows into her quiver one by one. Each one settled without sound. "Home," she told Storm. He put the crawler in gear. The northern buyer would come for what she now carried. She meant to be waiting.

The crawler rolled south through low hills. Rebecka sat with the quiver across her knees. The arrows were quiet now, but the northern buyer was not a problem she could sleep through. He knew her name. He knew the arrows were gone. She did not know his face, his road, or the hour he would come. "He'll move fast," Storm said from the driver's seat. "He paid for those shafts. He'll want blood before he wants the arrows back." "Then I need to see him before he sees me," Rebecka said. She pulled the cloaking prism from her pack and set it on the dash. The stone flickered and steadied. The crawler's outline blurred against the road. One hour of cover. Long enough to reach the fae hollow and ask for eyes she did not have. The between-road opened at a stand of birch. Storm drove them through. The hollow rose from the moss in glowing mushroom towers and lantern-strung bridges. Lark met them on the lower stair, wings folded tight. "You came back sooner than we agreed," he said. "I need to know where the northern buyer is," Rebecka said. "Before he finds my gate." Lark led her up two flights to a room lined with pale flowers. He set a shallow bowl of water on the floor. "My people can look, but only through a living link. Someone who has already touched the buyer's magic." "Ninka has," Rebecka said. "His people wrote her name." Lark nodded and sent a runner. Within the hour Ninka arrived through the between-road with Katia at her elbow. The giant jumping spider rode on the girl's shoulder, its eyes bright and steady. Rebecka's chest tightened. Ten years old, and the room quieted for her. "Mama," Ninka said. She climbed onto a floating hammock strung between two mushroom pillars. The spider stepped down to the floor and turned to face the bowl. "Ride with her," Rebecka said. "Only look. Don't touch him." Ninka closed her eyes. The spider's legs braced. The water in the bowl darkened. An image formed: a lean man in a fur collar, a map spread on a table, six riders behind him. A dragon's shadow crossed the map. Aureath, circling for hire. The man tapped a mark on the map. Rebecka's homestead. "Two days," Ninka whispered. "He rides in two days. He has hired the dragon." The image broke. Ninka slumped in the hammock. Katia caught her hand. Rebecka stood. She had her warning. Two days. Six riders and a dragon against her dome. "Home," she said to Storm. "We set the ground before he reaches it." She carried Ninka to the crawler herself. The quiver hummed low against her back, patient now, waiting for the shot she would need to make.

The crawler cleared the between-road at dusk and rolled up to the homestead gate. The fae dome held the yard in a soft, steady light. Two days until the buyer came. Rebecka carried Ninka inside and stood a long moment in the kitchen, looking at her daughter's shoulder where the spider rode. The dome would stop arrows. It would not stop a dragon. "If Ninka is under the dome when it falls, we lose her," Rebecka said. "The buyer put her name on his list. He'll come through the roof for her." Katia set a cup down hard. "Then she isn't under it." "There's nowhere safe within a day's ride," Marcus said. "He hired the dragon. Anywhere on the ground, the dragon finds her." Rebecka looked at her hand. The heart-cut stone in her ring caught the lantern light. She had worn it four years and used it once. She turned it on her finger. "Not on the ground," she said. She went out into the yard alone and lifted the ring to the sky. The stone warmed. A wind pushed down through the garden beds. Pastel Emberwing settled on the packed dirt with her wings folded, smoke curling pale from her nostrils. The dragon lowered her head to Rebecka's hand. "I need you to carry my daughter," Rebecka said. "Not to a place. Just up. Stay in the clouds until I signal. If the fight goes wrong, you take her north and you do not come back." Emberwing's eye held hers. The smoke drifted between them and Rebecka's chest loosened a notch. She brought Ninka out with a pack of food from the garden shelves, the spider tight on the girl's collar. Katia followed with a blanket and would not let go of Ninka's wrist until Rebecka said her name twice. "You ride high," Rebecka told Ninka. "Above the dome. Above the dragon he hired. The spider goes with you into the astral if anything reaches for you up there. You do not come down for any voice but mine." "Not even Gran's?" Ninka asked. "Not even hers." Marcus came out of the shed in the crystal battle armor, sigils lit along the plates. He lifted Ninka onto Emberwing's back and cinched the blanket under her knees. The spider's legs braced on the girl's shoulder, eyes bright. Emberwing rose. The wingbeats flattened the flowers in the beds. In four seconds the dragon was a pale mark against the cloud, then nothing. Rebecka lowered her hand. The dome hummed above the roof, empty of the child it had been built to hold. "He'll come and find the house," Marcus said. "Not her." "Good." Rebecka slung the quiver across her back. "Then the fight is only ours." She walked the perimeter once and began marking her shooting lines while there was still light.

Rebecka finished marking her shooting lines as the last light drained from the yard. The dome hummed above the roof. Ninka rode the clouds somewhere north, and the buyer's six riders would arrive at dawn to a house that held no child. When they found the empty rooms, they would scatter to hunt her. Six riders. Six roads off the ridge. She could hold one. She went into the shed and pulled the tarp off Marcus's crystal battle armor. The sigils along the plates woke under her hand. "You wear this," she said when he came in. "Not me. If they break past me, you're what's between them and the hills where she's flying." Marcus buckled the chestplate. "You need a second bow on the ridge." "I need them not to scatter." She pulled her map onto the workbench and stabbed a finger at the six roads leaving the homestead. "If they leave here separate, I lose four of them into the trees. Ninka's up there. If one gets clear and calls the dragon down on her, the ring won't bring her back in time." Katia set down a cup of tea Rebecka didn't touch. "Then don't let them leave here separate." Rebecka looked at the crystal RV parked behind the barn, still under its cloaking wrap from the refugee run. An idea moved. "They come for a child in a house. If the house runs, they follow the house." Marcus caught it. "Bait." "One target. One road. My road." She rolled the map. "You drive. Katia inside with the shutters down. I ride the roof." At first light the RV pulled out of the yard under its cloak, then dropped the cloak a mile down the west track so the dust plume showed. Rebecka lay flat on the crystal roof with the star-forged quiver across her back. Marcus drove hard enough to look like flight. The riders came over the rise in a tight knot, six as promised. They saw the RV and stayed a knot. No one peeled off. They believed the child was in the box. Rebecka rose to one knee and started shooting. The bow told her when each man was close enough to die and she hated the whisper each time and drew anyway. Four arrows, four riders down before the last two understood the trap. One turned his horse. She put an arrow through his shoulder and the second through his ribs on the next breath. The sixth broke for the tree line. She stood on the moving roof, breathed out, and took him at the edge of the field. Marcus stopped the RV. The dust settled on six bodies on one road. Rebecka lifted the ring and signaled the sky. A dark-winged shape uncoiled from the cloud above them and began its long slide down, Ninka small and safe on its back.

Ninka slid down from the dragon's shoulder into Katia's arms. Rebecka watched the sky where the shape had come from and saw the second shadow still up there, wider, slower, waiting. Aureath had carried the buyer to her fence line and had not been paid. He would want his fee from whoever was left. She walked out past the garden beds. The glowing planters along the homestead wall lit her from below, herbs and strange fruit under humming lamps. She stopped in the open yard so he could see her small and alone. The dragon came down in one long drop and landed hard enough to shake the beds. His head lowered on a neck like a bridge. Smoke curled from his teeth. "The man who hired you is dead on the west track," Rebecka said. "His riders with him. There is no purse." "A contract is a contract," Aureath said. His voice was low and slow. "Someone pays. Or the house burns." She had nothing left to offer. Her mother's talisman was gone to the between-road. The star-forged arrows would not bite a creature that had done her no wrong, and she would not spend them on a debt. She reached into her coat and drew out the thing she had carried since the north slope. Dirk's doll. Stitched cloth, button eyes, pins still in its chest, his name sewn across the belly. She had kept it because burning it felt too easy and throwing it away felt worse. "I have this," she said. She held it up so he could see the pins. "He taught his knot to students. He bound me with it. He is dead and the doll is still warm. Whoever holds it holds a door into that magic. It is worth something to a creature who keeps toll." Aureath lowered his head further. One yellow eye fixed on the doll. He breathed in through his nose and the pins trembled. "Dark work," he said. "Owed work. I know the knot." "Then you know what it costs the one who carries it. Take it as the fee. The contract closes. You leave my roof alone." He was quiet a long moment. Behind her, Marcus stood in the doorway in the crystal armor, one hand on a potion at his belt. Katia had pulled Ninka inside. "Set it down," Aureath said. Rebecka laid the doll on the flat stone by the herb beds and stepped back three paces. The dragon's tongue flicked once and the doll was gone. He lifted his head. "Paid," he said. "Do not call me again without coin." He rose off the yard in two beats and was a shape against the clouds, then nothing. Rebecka stood in the lamp-glow of the planters and felt her hands shake. The house still stood. The child was inside it. The quiver on her back was hers, and the last thread Dirk had left in her pocket was gone with the dragon.