The path down from High Roost was a silver knife under the moon. Sled runners hissed over frozen ground, oxen breathed ghosts into the air, and every man in the convoy kept his eyes fixed on the dark slopes above, waiting for the first arrow, the first howl, the first tumbling rock.

  Nothing came.

  The Ash Wolves watched, but they did not strike.

  Kaelen’s shoulders stayed tight under his cloak all the same. Beside him, Hareth muttered under his breath, one gloved hand resting on his sword hilt.

  “This is wrong,” Hareth said quietly. “They had us in the Narrows. Perfect spot. We’d have died before we could turn a cart. Wolves don’t ignore meat on a plate.”

  “Maybe we aren’t the meat they’re hunting anymore,” Kaelen answered, though the thought did nothing to ease the knot in his gut.

  Behind them, the first wool-laden sledges creaked along the widening road, shepherds trudging at their sides. The sling-women of High Roost walked in a loose screen, eyes sharp, hands never far from the pouches on their belts.

  They reached a flat shelf where the path broadened enough for two carts to pass. The valley lay below in a dark, sleeping sprawl.

  “Another hour,” Hareth said. “We’ll be on the main road. After that, it’s just frostbite and backaches.”

  “Assuming we’re allowed to get that far,” Kaelen replied.

  As if answering him, something moved at the edge of the lamplight ahead.

  “Hold!” Kaelen barked.

  The word snapped through the column. Ox drivers hauled on reins. The sled line jolted to a stop.

  A single rider stepped out from between a stand of black pines farther up the track.

  He came at an easy walk, not a charge. No raised weapon, no war cry. Just the steady clop of hooves on frozen earth.

  “Elias,” Hareth growled.

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  “I see him,” Elias said.

  The Steel-Rank archer was already moving. He flowed from the shadow of a sled like water, longbow rising in one unbroken motion. The bowstring came back to his ear; the arrowhead leveled at the rider’s chest. A faint silver shimmer crawled along the shaft as his Battleforce gathered, ready to punch through armor and bone alike.

  The rider did not slow.

  He was young, Kaelen saw as he approached—no more than twenty winters, with the rangy build of a man who’d grown on lean meat and cold wind. He wore the mottled grey and white furs of the Ash Wolves, his cloak pattern breaking his outline against the rock. A short recurve bow was slung unstrung at his back; his hands were empty and held away from his sides, palms open.

  But it was the horse that made Kaelen’s eyes narrow.

  It was not some plow nag or stunted pony. It was a mountain-bred warhorse, wild-blooded and powerful. Thick neck, broad chest, haunches like coiled springs. Its shaggy mane tossed as it snorted, breath steaming. Iron studs gleamed on its bridle. Even standing still, it radiated restless energy.

  If I had a hundred of those under knights… Two hundred…

  The rider stopped twenty paces away.

  “Another step and you die,” Elias called, voice flat. “Your heart is already sighted.”

  The young man slowly swung his leg over the horse and slid to the ground. Snow crunched under his boots. He took three unhurried steps forward.

  Then he dropped to one knee.

  He bowed his head, pressing his fist into the frozen mud.

  A shocked murmur rippled down the line. Mara sucked in a breath. Hareth stared.

  Mountain tribesmen fought standing. They spat blood in their enemies’ faces. They did not kneel. Not to their own chiefs. Certainly not to valley lords.

  “Baron…” Hareth said carefully. “This… isn’t a thing they do.”

  Kaelen nudged his horse forward a few steps, until he loomed over the kneeling figure.

  “Raise your head,” Kaelen ordered.

  The young man lifted his face. Up close, Kaelen saw the soot smeared along his jaw, the red veins spidering his eyes, the fine tremor in his fingers.

  He looked scared.

  Not the fear of a man facing an arrow.

  The fear of a man who’d been running from something he couldn’t fight.

  “Name,” Kaelen said.

  “I am Zarn,” the young man answered hoarsely. “Son of Zark, Chieftain of the Ash Wolves.”

  A chief’s son, kneeling in the road like a supplicant. Every instinct screamed that this should not be real.

  “What do you want?” Kaelen asked, voice going cold and hard.

  Kael swallowed. For a heartbeat, nothing came out.

  Then, quietly, he said the last word anyone in the valley expected from a raider.

  “Help.”

  The sound of it cracked something in the night.

  Mara spat into the snow. “Help? You burned my barn and took my ewes, dog. The only help you’re owed is a rope.”

  “We burned your barn because we were hungry,” Zarn said, looking at her briefly before turning back to Kaelen. “Because that is what we have always done when the snows bite too deep. Take from the valley and curse the lords who sit behind their walls.”

  He shook his head, as if at some bitter joke.

  “But now the snows are not what’s killing us. It is our own.”

  He lifted an arm and pointed back toward the jagged line of the Razorbacks, their teeth cutting into the star-sprinkled sky.