Valdren crouched in the snow a half mile from the gate and counted the men on its wall. He counted twelve. Twelve was eleven too many for one sword. The gate was the only way through the pass into the valley where his father was buried, and he had come a thousand miles to stand here and learn he could not cross alone. He had built his camp in a stand of black pine where the smoke would scatter before it rose. A canvas tent sat over a shallow fire pit. Inside, his bedroll lay beside a whetstone and a strip of dried meat he had not touched in two days. He had pitched the tent four nights ago and told himself he was watching the border. He was not watching. He was stalling. The gate itself was older than the men who held it. Two stone towers rose out of the drift, hung with iron bars and crusted with ice that never broke through summer. His own people had built it, generations back, to keep raiders out of the valley. His own people had opened it, in his lifetime, to let the raiders in. They had called it survival. His father had called it something else and died for the word. Valdren had been nineteen. He had been running before the bodies cooled. He pulled the pendant from under his collar and held it in his glove. Stone set in soft metal, worn smooth by his father's thumb and then by his. It was the only proof left that the valley had ever belonged to his line. He had carried it through six wars under six banners. He had taken coin from men he hated to keep it fed and sharp. He had learned, in those wars, that one sword at a gate is a corpse, and that a corpse does not dig up a grave. He broke camp at dusk. He rolled the tent, kicked snow over the fire, and turned south, away from the gate, toward the logging roads where deserters and broken men drank through the winter. He had no army. He would have to buy one, or gather one, or lie one into being. The grave would wait. It had waited twenty years. He set the pendant back against his chest and started walking.