The gates of Kithra opened like a jaw at dawn.
Mist bled off the stone teeth of the battlements, trailing into ribbons that curled around our boots as we crossed the threshold. Behind us, bells tolled the low, steady rhythm of the morning rites. In front of us, the road thinned to a pale vein along the cliffside, the sea breathing below with the patience of a god that never tires.
Father Seran walked beside us the last dozen paces, robes dark with dew. Elya clutched his hand until the very end, the sleeves of her borrowed cloak slipping over her knuckles.
"Remember what I told you," Seran said, bending to her height. "Eat when you can, sleep when you must, and don't try to be braver than your bones."
Elya nodded solemnly, then did the most Elya thing she could have done—rose to her tiptoes and pressed the little bundle of lavender she'd saved from the ceremony into his palm. "For your room," she said. "So it won't be lonely."
Seran's eyes shone, though the man was too old to admit it. "Then it won't be," he murmured.
The white-haired boy stood a few steps away, as if he'd simply appeared there when the mist moved. He was barefoot on the cold stone, white hair unmoving in the wind, gaze fixed on me with that ageless patience I'd come to recognize. He didn't speak. He never did when I wanted him to. He reached up instead and touched the knuckle of my sword hand, a brief, light contact that sent a small thunder through the runes under my skin.
"I don't suppose you're coming," I said, because silence made me feel like I was missing some trap.
He tilted his head. For a heartbeat, his irises were not eyes but rings of sand slipping in an hourglass, and then—only a boy again. He stepped back, and the mist closed a curtain between us.
Seran raised a hand in benediction. "May the Lady of Oaths guard your steps and the Hourless turn his gaze when you need to pass unseen."
Auralia squeezed my fingers. "We'll write," she lied sweetly.
Seran chuckled. "You'll do no such thing. You'll keep breathing. That's enough of a miracle."
We went.
Kithra dwindled quickly, a gray crown receding into the cliff behind us. The road sloped east and south at once, shouldering the curve of the land where Rockan's coastline rose into jagged bookshelves of stone. The cliffs were striated, bands of ochre and iron and ash revealing ages like rings in a tree. Seabirds arrowed out of the fog and vanished again. The air smelled of salt and pilgrim bread, of kelp and cold iron.
Auralia walked a half-step ahead, cloak pinned at her throat with the plain bronze brooch they'd given her at the temple. She moved lightly even in travel gear, the grace of a dancer and a thief, keeping to the road's inward lip without seeming to look. The mark at her chest—Asix's brand—was hidden beneath linen and leather, but I felt it like a second pulse when I walked close enough. My runes answered sometimes, a faint prickle like static under my skin. Once, when she glanced back and smiled, both pulses steadied, and I pretended that meant something under our control.
"You're thinking," she said without turning.
"I try to do that occasionally."
"About me?"
"Yes."
"About the road?"
"Yes."
"About whether we'll find decent stew in Mizuhara."
I considered. "That too."
She laughed, the sound like struck glass. Elya darted between us, arms out as if balancing on a beam, narrating the world to herself under her breath—the names she had invented for the cliff gulls, the rocks that resembled prowling cats, the one patch of lichen she swore shaped a star. When she stumbled, Auralia caught her by the hood without looking, a motion so fluid it might have been muscle memory from another life.
We made good time, which is to say no one bled and the sky didn't fall. Midday we broke along a runnel of fresh water that bled out of the cliff, and I stripped the gauntlet from my left hand to drink. The runes along my forearm glimmered in the reflected light—lines of ink that weren't ink, living script drawn from promises I hadn't made and battles I hadn't fought yet. They didn't hum with the wrongness that had haunted me in Kithra. Here, with the horizon open and the city's rot behind us, the power felt less like a fever and more like a pulse. Not tame. Never that. But close enough to my own breath that, if I shut my eyes, I could pretend.
Auralia's gaze flickered to the markings and away again. She didn't comment. Neither did I. That, too, had become a kind of pact between us—do not touch the wound unless you're ready to bind it. The mark on her chest. The runes on my arm. The way both responded to each other like distant thunder calling back across a valley.
Past noon, the road forked: a narrow goat track veering inland through scrub and stone, and the Ravenspine Route shouldering the cliff a while longer before bending east toward the forest bands that guarded Mizuhara's hinterlands. We took the latter. Not because it was safer—but because it was the only way to keep east without climbing hand and foot for two days. Elya kept pace without complaint, though by the time the light began to thin, her steps shortened and her answers to our questions turned into small sounds.
"We'll stop soon," I promised.
"Soon," she echoed, a soldier accepting terms.
We made camp where the cliff widened into a shallow shelf bordered by thorn-bush and a low wind-carved lip of stone. The sea's voice rose and fell below. The sky, turning the color of old bruise, promised stars if the mist would only lift. I set the small brazier I'd traded for in Kithra and coaxed a cautious flame from driftwood and a sparkstone; we dared not build a bigger fire where the wind could sign our location to anyone with eyes on the cliff.
Auralia checked our perimeter with the quiet efficiency of a habit learned and relearned. She never made a show of it—half the trick was in the not-seeming—but I'd come to know the pattern: the way she pressed her palm to certain stones, the string she ran low between thorns, the pebbles she set in a crescent near the path, a crescent that would become a circle if an unwary foot moved two. To anyone else, the shelf looked untouched. To us, it was a web with every strand in her hands.
Web. The word pricked me. It hadn't been the one I would have reached for before. I rubbed my forearm without thinking.
Elya ate soup in careful, serious mouthfuls, knees under her chin, cloak wrapped around her like a sleeping bird. "What's Mizuhara like?" she asked, when the steam stopped making her eyes water.
"Pretty," Auralia said. "Canals instead of streets in some quarters. Lanterns draped over the water. Markets where the spices make your eyes sting and your stomach joyful. People who like to bargain until someone pretends to be insulted. It works better if you pretend first."
"Is it safe?" Elya asked.
Auralia's smile thinned. "Safe enough to sleep. Not safe enough to stop looking."
Elya nodded like she'd expected that answer and hadn't wanted any other.
I offered, "There's a noodle-seller near the North Lock who gives you an extra egg if you promise to come back with a better story. He never remembers if you do."
"He remembers the stories," Auralia said. "He forgets the faces."
"That's what I meant."
Elya considered. "What if I tell him a good story?"
"He'll give you two eggs," Auralia said.
"And make you promise three," I added.
Auralia nudged me with her boot. The fire cracked softly. For a fragile hour, the world pretended to be simple again.
When the light fully went, the mist took that as permission to creep back over the cliff edge. It came in low, like a patient animal, and pooled around our ankles. I set a small ward—nothing grand, a circle of ash traced with the runes that meant watch and listen. The marks on my arm warmed, a low ember, and the ash lifted in the slightest exhale that only someone who'd bled with magic would see.
Auralia looked up from where she crouched, checking knots. "You're getting better at that."
"It didn't explode," I said. "So yes."
"Give it time."
"That's what worries me."
We took watches by unspoken agreement—Auralia first, me second. Elya insisted on volunteering for a third until both of us told her the third watch is for people who can win an argument with the wind. She frowned, considered picking a fight with the wind, and then conceded to sleep, muttering that she'd debate the breeze in the morning when it had breakfast.
Auralia's hand brushed mine when I moved to roll my cloak near the windbreak. Just a touch. Just enough heat to pull the sting out of the mist. "Try to sleep," she said softly. "You dream too loudly when you don't."
"What does that mean?"
"You move like you're fighting in a corridor the width of a coffin."
"Comforting."
"It's meant to be instructive."
"Is it working?"
"Ask the wind," she said, and kissed the corner of my mouth with a smile that made my bones remember sunlight.
I slept. Or I drifted, which is what passes for sleep when duty ties a knot around your ribcage and pulls. The brazier's ember pulsed with my breathing. The sea laid its slow hand on the rocks and lifted it again. Somewhere in the fog, a gull forgot itself and called up the moon.
Then something spoke, small and sharp, between my shoulder blades. Not a voice. A warning. The ash circle stirred as if it had dreamed of rain.
I opened my eyes to dark, not full but thick. Auralia sat with her back to the outer stone, one knee up, one hand resting on the hilt of her rapier, eyes half-lidded but not at all asleep. When she noticed me noticing, she angled her chin toward the cliff face beyond our shelf.
I listened.
At first, only the sea. The soft stringing of the mist through thorn. Then, under it, a sound like someone drumming two thin sticks on leather stretched too tight. It came and went. Close. Far. Then close again. Rhythmic, but not human. Not hooves. Not paws.
I pushed my cloak aside and sat up. The runes along my arm cooled and warmed in a pattern that made no sense except to the part of me that had been a Warden for about the length of a heartbeat in a god's hand.
Auralia's mouth framed the shape of a word rather than risk air. Listen.
I did. The drumming shifted, softened into a subtle skitter, as if fingers pressed in many places along the cliff. Then silence. Then a low line of sound like a string being pulled across teeth.
Elya murmured and turned in her sleep. Auralia's attention snapped to her, then back to the cliff. "We'll move at first light," she mouthed. I nodded. We didn't move now because moving now was noise, and noise was invitation.
The mist thickened. The ember in the brazier hissed. The ash circle stirred again, as if a moth had flown too near and changed its mind. The skittering faded by degrees until even Auralia's shoulders loosened. She flicked two fingers—your watch—and I took her place while she slid down, head to her pack, rapier angled so that if anyone looked, it would seem like one more slant of shadow.
The second hour is the cruel one. The body wants to sag, the mind wants to walk. I counted breaths. I counted waves. I whispered the names of places I had never seen and intended to. Nobarvan. Kharak. Nuzitha. It helped. A little.
The sound woke like a splinter under a fingernail. Not the skitter. Not the drum. A kind of faint, dry clicking, like beads tapped lightly together. I didn't move. I let my eyes go soft and unfocused, the way my first teacher had shown me how to watch a room you wanted to pretend you weren't watching. The cliff face beyond our shelf wasn't just dark; it was patterned—shadow in bands, shadow in chords. As I watched, one chord changed. A darker thread drew itself sideways, then upward, then stilled.
I inhaled once, very slowly. The runes on my arm prickled. The ash at the circle's edge lifted a grain and set it down again.
The clicking stopped.
"Eiran?" Elya's voice was very small and not fully awake.
"Hush," I said, as gently as I could turn the air into a hand.
She sat up anyway, hair a tangle, eyes milked with sleep. "I—"
Auralia's palm was already up, silent. Elya swallowed the rest of the word. She looked toward the cliff like a child would—straight at the thing that shouldn't be seen.
"What is it?" she whispered, lips barely moving.
"Wind," I lied.
Elya's eyes went wide. Not with fear of the cliff. With something else. She turned her head very slightly, like she was listening to a distant song she might have heard once. Her small hand found mine and pressed, cold fingers, fast pulse. "Don't talk," she said, and the way she said it wasn't a child asking. It was a traveler who had woken up on a rope bridge in a storm and remembered she had only one hand left.
We didn't.
The mist thinned. The chord of shadow on the cliff resolved into what it had always been—stone and emptiness—and I could almost believe I'd invented the movement because fear likes to be useful too. Elya didn't look away for a long time. When she finally did, it was only to press closer to Auralia and wrap both arms around her waist under the cloak.
We made it to first light without another sound.
The dawn came slowly, as if the sun were deciding whether we were worth the trouble. When color bled into the world at last, it did so in blues and tired golds, enough to cast edges back where the fog had rubbed them smooth. Auralia brewed tea in the brazier cup, the steam curling around her fingers. Elya accepted hers with both hands and didn't drink.
"You're pale," Auralia said quietly, scanning her face.
"I dreamed," Elya said.
Auralia and I both waited.
Elya's voice went far away, the way children's voices do when they are braver than the truth. "Everything had eyes," she said. "Not like ours. Like… like little beads. On the walls. And they weren't looking at me. They were listening to me look at them."
Auralia's gaze flicked to mine and back. "Dreams can't hurt you here."
"I know," Elya said, and then she screamed.
It ripped out of her as if the sound had been living inside her ribs all night and only now found the door. She flung the cup; it struck the stone lip and shattered, tea flecking the cliff like blood washed thin. She scrambled backwards into the thorn before I could catch her, palms torn, breath coming in jagged bursts.
"What is it?" I was already on my knees, the runes in my arm flaring hot enough to sting.
Elya didn't seem to hear me. She stared past us, past the embers, past the circle of ash, past even the road—eyes so wide I thought they'd crack. When she finally found her voice, it came out as a whisper that wished it were still a scream.
"They're here," she said. "The eyes on the walls."