Verona crouched in the snow above the valley and counted the bone trophies bolted to the warlord's tower. Forty-one skulls. Last week there had been thirty-nine. The tower stood at the center of his compound like a planted flag, and somewhere inside it he kept the blade her mother had pressed into her hand every morning of her childhood. Verona had mapped the guard rotations. She had found a side door that did not latch. She knew how to get in. She did not know which room held the blade, and without that, going in meant dying in the dark for nothing. She slid back behind the ridge and pulled the bone tablet from her coat. The runes her mother had taught her ran down one side in tight rows. The other side she had filled herself: names of every person rumored to have seen the theft, and a mark beside each one. Three marks meant dead. Two meant gone south. One meant alive and reachable. A month ago she had eleven ones. Now she had four. Every day she spent watching the tower, another witness froze or fled or was found in a ditch with their throat opened. The warlord was cleaning up behind himself, and he was faster than she was. She traced a finger down to the last cluster of single marks. They all pointed to the same place — a ring of standing stones a half day's walk east, where the old families used to meet before the warlord took the valley. The witnesses who were still alive had gone back there. Verona did not know why. She only knew that if she wanted someone to tell her which room in that tower held her mother's blade, she had to ride out tonight and find them before the warlord did. She was packing the tablet away when a small white shape stepped onto the ridge beside her. An arctic fox, one ear split clean through, the tufts hanging like torn ribbon. It did not run. It watched her with yellow eyes and then turned and trotted three paces east and stopped, waiting. Verona had been taught not to believe in signs. She had also been taught not to ignore a creature that walked toward a hunter instead of away. She followed. The fox led her down a goat track she had not mapped, one that cut a full hour off the eastern road. By dusk she stood at the edge of the worn stone ring. Two figures sat inside it, wrapped in furs, a small fire between them. They looked up when she stepped through the arch, and one of them — an old woman with frostbitten hands — said Verona's mother's name out loud before Verona had said anything at all. Verona's plan to arrive unknown to anyone ended in that moment. Her search for the blade began in the next.