Zade knelt in the snow where the last of his court had died, and tried to lift a shard of black ice the size of his hand. It weighed nothing. He could not move it. Three winters ago, he had held a ridge alone against a thing without a name. It came out of the deep frost and it broke his people the way a boot breaks a bird's nest. He had sworn, as their guardian, to shield each of them. When the last one fell, the oath fell with her, and his power went quiet inside him like a snuffed lamp. A fae of his order could not weave shadow to its full weight without someone living to protect. He had known this. He had not believed how empty it would feel. He stood. Seven feet of him, wrapped in a cloak that once moved like a second skin and now only hung. The silver veins under his tan had gone dull. His wings would not come at all. He had tracked the thing that killed his court for three winters, following claw-marks in ice and stories in mountain villages. Each time he closed the distance, he felt how little he could bring to the fight. A guardian without a charge. A blade with no hand. Something small coughed in the snow behind him. He turned. A snow leopard cub lay on its side under a broken pine. Silver fur, spotted like old coins. One ice-blue eye open, the other crusted shut with frozen blood. Its tail-tip glowed faintly, a smear of pale green light on the snow. He knew what it was. The old stories called them aurora-kin, born once in a hundred winters, and the thing he hunted ate them first. Claw-marks scored the trunk above the cub. Fresh. The cub tried to hiss at him and managed a small wet sound instead. Zade crouched. He had walked past dying creatures before. His job had been men, women, the sworn. Not this. "If I take you up," he said, "I take you for keeps." The cub bit weakly at his glove. He lifted it anyway. It fit in the curve of one palm. He pressed his thumb against the ruined eye and spoke the old binding under his breath, the words a guardian says once and never takes back. Heat moved through his chest. The silver veins under his skin brightened and began to pulse. Behind him, without his asking, his wings unfurled in a rush of smoke and cold air, and the snow around his boots went dark as a well. The shard of black ice at his feet lifted an inch off the ground on its own. The cub looked up at him with its good eye. Zade tucked it inside his cloak, against the warmth of his ribs. Then he lifted his head and looked at the fresh claw-marks on the pine. The thing that had killed his court was close, and now he had something to lose again.

Zade moved fast through the pines with the cub inside his cloak. Its heartbeat pressed against his ribs, small and quick. He meant to find the killer's trail again before dark. He got a mile before he understood he was the one being followed. The first sign was a raven going the wrong way. Then a silence in the branches that spread outward instead of ahead. He stopped and set his hand against a trunk. Four scents on the wind. Frostwolves, by the weight of the tread. They had never hunted him before. They were hunting him now because of what he carried. Aurora-kin scent clung to the fur lining of his cloak like smoke on wool. Every predator in the valley would know it within a day. He could not run and track the killer at the same time. He had to end this here. He pulled the cub out and set it in the hollow of a root. Then he unclasped his own cloak, the black one he had worn for three winters, and dropped it in the snow. From his pack he drew the traveling cloak he had taken from a dead trader's sled a month back: heavy purple wool, fur-trimmed, silver clasps at the throat. Clean. No blood, no leopard scent. He fastened it around the cub and tucked the hood over the small silver head. The fur swallowed the cub whole. "Stay," he said. He pushed the bundle deep into the root hollow and drew a line of shadow across the opening. The Nightveil closed like a shut eye. Then he picked up his old cloak, still rank with aurora-kin, and walked back down his own trail carrying it in his fist. They came at him in the clearing he chose. Four of them, lean and white, jaws already open. He let them see the cloak. He let them lunge for it. When the first wolf hit the wool, he dropped it and stepped sideways through its own shadow. He came out behind the pack. His wings snapped wide. He drove three spears of solid dark into three backs before the last wolf turned. That one he took with his hands, shadow crushing its throat until the legs stopped kicking. It was over in the time it takes to breathe six times. He stood in the red snow and listened. No more feet in the trees. He walked back to the root hollow and lifted the veil. The cub blinked up at him from inside the purple hood, unharmed. He left the old cloak in the clearing with the wolves. It was ruined bait now, and the scent on it would draw the rest of the valley here, away from him. He wrapped the cub against his chest under the new cloak and turned north. The killer's trail was a full day colder. He had bought the cub's life with it.

Zade turned north with the cub against his chest and tried to pick up the killer's trail again. He found it inside an hour, a single deep print at the base of a split pine. The shape was wrong for any beast he knew: three long toes, a drag mark behind the heel. He crouched and set his palm near it. The snow was still falling. The edges of the print were already softening. He followed it fast. The trail ran uphill along a frozen creek, then across a slope of loose scree buried under white. He counted six more prints in the next mile. Each one was shallower than the last. The storm was eating them. By the time he reached the ridge, the wind had turned. Snow blew sideways across his face. He knelt at the last print he could see and brushed the surface clear. Nothing underneath but more snow. He walked a slow circle, twenty paces out, then forty. He found no track on the far side of the ridge. He found no track back at the creek. The killer had climbed into the storm and the storm had swallowed the path. The cub shifted under the purple wool and made a small sound against his ribs. Its body was cooling. He pressed his hand flat over the shape of it and felt the fast, thin heartbeat slow a notch. He had a choice and he knew the shape of it before he made it. Push on through the night, lose the cub to the cold, lose the trail anyway. Or stop. He stopped. He cast Nightveil around them both and moved down the lee side of the ridge, out of the wind. Half a mile in, tucked against a rock shoulder, he found a cabin. Dark timber, steep roof heavy with snow, icicles along the eaves. A single lantern hung dead at the door. No smoke from the black stone chimney. No prints in the drift across the step. He drew a spear of shadow and opened the door with it first. The room inside was empty and cold. A stove. A cot. A stack of split wood. Someone had left in a hurry, or had not come back. He laid the cub on the cot and got a fire going. He unwrapped the small body and rubbed warmth back into the fur until the shivering eased. Then he sat on the floor beside the cot with his back against the wood and let the heat reach him. The trail was gone. He had traded another day, and this time he had traded the trail itself. The killer was somewhere ahead in the storm, and Zade no longer knew where. He watched the cub sleep. Outside, the snow kept falling on the last print he would ever find of that hunt. He would have to pick up the trail another way.

By morning the storm had thinned to a slow, steady fall. Zade sat on the cabin floor and watched the cub breathe. It was too weak to walk. Too small to leave. He needed meat before nightfall, and he could not hunt with the cub in his arms. He had no one left to hand it to. His court was ash three winters gone, and every name he trusted had died with it. He stood at the window and counted his options. There were two. Take the cub into the cold and fail. Or leave it here alone and hope nothing found the door. Neither answer kept it alive. A sound cut the quiet. Not wind. A high, bright hum, closer with each breath, like a kettle that had learned a tune. Golden light bled through the gaps in the shutters. Zade drew a shadow blade and stepped to the side of the door. The door banged open. Snow blew in. So did she. Lily Spark landed on the boards in a scatter of golden motes, wings buzzing, cheeks pink from the cold. She was barely four feet tall and shining like a lantern someone had forgotten to cover. She had been his friend for a hundred years and had never once knocked. "You," she said, jabbing a finger at his chest, "are very hard to find. Very. Hard." She shook snow out of her hair. "Also. Something is hunting where you live. I flew all night. My wings hurt. Say hello." Zade lowered the blade. "Hello." Her eyes went past him to the cot. She stopped talking. That, more than anything, told him she understood. "Oh," she said, softer. She crossed the room and knelt by the cub. Her light dimmed on its own, warm gold going honey-slow so as not to startle it. "Oh, you tiny thing." "Aurora-kin," Zade said. "Bound to me. It cannot travel yet." She looked up at him. Her face did the fast thing it always did, joke, then plain. "You need to hunt." "Yes." "And you have nobody." "No." "You have me." She said it flat, like she was naming a fact. "Go. I will sit on this cub. I will yell at anything that comes through that door. My light stays on. Nothing dark gets close." He did not move. He had not asked anyone for anything in three winters. "Zade." She used his name like a small stone dropped on a table. "Go. Before it dies." He pulled his cloak on. He set his palm on the cub's flank once, felt the thin heartbeat, and then he walked out into the snow. He brought back a hare and a lean fox before dark. The cub ate. Lily was still on the cot, glowing steady, arguing with the fire. She told him then what she had flown all night to tell him. The thing he was hunting already knew where he lived. It was going to his home.