Namey had gone very still beside me, and I watched something click into place behind his eyes with the specific, unhappy clarity of a man finding a piece of a puzzle he'd already half assembled in his own head, one he clearly wished had stayed missing a while longer.
"Ashwright," he repeated. "That's the name Ilse gave us. The very first company name, before Threnody, before whatever came between. If that's not just an old alias he's outgrown, if it's an actual place, a seat, then we're not looking at the source anymore. We might be looking at the second-to-last thing standing between us and wherever this whole operation actually answers to."
Aki, curled at the shelter's entrance with his wings folded tight against the night's cold, lifted his head at that and let out a low sound, wary and questioning, and Yoshi, who'd stayed pressed close against my collar through the entire run and the entire conversation since, chose that exact moment to climb free of my collar and settle himself directly on top of the ring still sitting in my open palm, small and warm and utterly unbothered by everything the object represented, and pressed his tiny clawed feet flat against the metal like he could somehow keep it from meaning what it meant just by sitting on it stubbornly enough.
I almost laughed. It came out closer to something else instead, something with a rough edge to it that I didn't examine too closely in front of everyone.
"Ashwright seat," I said, testing the words the same way I'd tested every other unfamiliar, unwanted piece of this whole journey since Hallowmere first went dark against the sky behind me. "North of here."
"North of here," Merit confirmed, and something in her voice had steadied, just slightly, the act of being useful to someone after however long she'd spent being nothing more than a shape in a cage clearly doing something for her that all our gentleness combined hadn't managed to do yet.
Savage looked at me across the small space between us, firelight nowhere near us now, only moonlight and the pale ghost of our own breath in the cold mountain air, and something passed between us that didn't need words to carry its whole weight.
"We're not done here," she said. "Not with Highhollow, not with what's still down in that mine, not with Merit and her neighbor needing somewhere safer than a lean-to before winter finishes setting in properly. But we've got a name now, and a direction, and a man who wants us walking toward both badly enough that he handed us the map himself." She stood, testing her legs, wincing slightly at whatever the run had cost her that she hadn't let herself feel until now. "Get some rest, all of you. Real rest, if you can manage it. Whatever's waiting north of here, it's not going anywhere before morning, and neither are we."
I closed my hand around the ring, feeling Yoshi's small warm weight still pressed stubbornly on top of it, and looked north past the dark shoulder of the mountain, toward wherever a place calling itself the Ashwright seat sat waiting for a boy it had apparently been expecting since long before he'd ever had a reason to come looking for it.
Somewhere out there, my father was still alive, comfortable, Ashe had said, relatively speaking, and far more aware of what he'd traded than I currently was of what I was about to trade myself, and I didn't yet know what that last part meant, only that it had been said with the specific patient certainty of a man who never made a promise he didn't already know how to keep.
The wind shifted, carrying the faint mineral tang of the tailings stream up from the valley below, and somewhere in the dark behind us, Highhollow slept on beneath its permanent grey haze, unaware or uncaring that four strangers, one wyvern, and two people who'd been counted as gone had just walked back out of its mountain carrying considerably more than they'd carried in.
North, then. Whatever waited there, it was expecting company, same as Highhollow had been, and for the first time since I'd read Ashe's note by lantern light in a city square two hundred miles south of where I now sat, I found myself less afraid of that fact than I was determined to make sure that whoever was doing the expecting understood exactly what kind of company was finally coming.