By the time Nathan reached the courtyard, the valley was already screaming.
Torches blazed along the estate walls. Warriors poured from the barracks, half-dressed, weapons in hand, awakened blood flaring in their eyes in every color: green, gold, the pale blue of wind. Orla had told him to stay in the tower. Nathan had run anyway.
Above the northern cliffs, the mist was tearing open.
"Gravehounds!" a sentry shouted from the wall. "Dozens of them, they're through the markers!"
Nathan had only read about them in the library's few surviving bestiaries. They were the size of oxen, gray-furred and long-jawed, with hide so thick that arrows snapped against it. They hunted in packs and never stopped until everything in their path was dead. No pack should ever have found Cladrake Valley. The boundary markers had held for three hundred years.
Tonight, they had gone dark all at once.
"Nathan!"
Mira ran toward him across the courtyard, a short blade in her hand and wind curling around her ankles. "What are you doing out here? Get inside!"
"I can help."
"You can't even—" She stopped. Her eyes dropped to his empty hands, then lifted to his face, and for a moment the whole story passed between them without words. She had seen the hall. She had seen the shattered crystal, and the way the adults looked at him afterward.
"It doesn't matter," she said, quieter. "Stay behind me."
The first hound cleared the wall.
It landed in the courtyard with a crack of stone, jaws wide, and the yard became chaos. Aldric Cladrake met it at a dead run. His blood flared, a roaring white light along both forearms that hardened into plates of living armor. He caught the beast's jaw in both hands and slammed it into the flagstones hard enough to split them.
More came. Six, ten, a dozen, pouring over the walls like a gray flood. The Cladrake warriors held a ragged line, steel and fire and wind against fang and claw, and for a few terrible minutes it seemed they might win.
Then a second wave came over the cliff, far larger than the first.
"They're herding us," Aldric snarled, driving a hound back with a burst of light. "Fall back to the hall! Everyone back!"
Nathan felt the line break before he saw it. A cousin screamed. A torch fell. Two hounds slipped through the gap and the whole courtyard turned, and in the middle of it all, Mira stood with her wind blade raised and one foot planted as a third hound launched at her from the shadows.
She never saw it.
Nathan did.
He didn't decide. There was no thought, no choice, just the quiet thing behind his ribs, vast and patient, and a single sharp certainty: *not her.*
He opened his hand.
The air went still.
The hound was in the middle of its leap, jaws wide and claws extended, and then it wasn't. It simply ended, mid-air, with no sound or flash. The space where it had been held only a faint shimmer, like heat rising from stone, and then that was gone too.
Mira staggered. Her blade dipped. She turned and stared at the empty air, then at Nathan, who stood with his arm still outstretched and his chest heaving.
"Nathan," she breathed. "What did you—"
He couldn't answer. A cold wave was rolling through his mind, sweeping something away. He grabbed at it, desperate, and felt it slip out of reach like water through fingers.
When it passed, he looked at Mira, and the warmth in his chest hesitated.
He knew her. Of course he knew her. She was his cousin, sixteen, B-rank, the girl who teased him on the wall every evening. But there was a hollow in him where something used to be, something that had been *theirs*. A summer afternoon. A cliff. The two of them, much younger, laughing at the top of something. He could remember that it had happened. He couldn't remember what it felt like.
"I forgot," he whispered.
"What?"
"Nothing." He swallowed. "I'm fine."
Behind them, two more hounds broke the line. Nathan turned toward them, and Mira grabbed his arm.
"Don't," she said, her voice shaking. "Whatever that was, don't. Look at your face."
He didn't need to look. He could feel it: the pallor, the trembling in his hands. Each use took something. He had known that for less than an hour and already understood how fast he could empty himself.
"I have to," he said.
"You *don't*—"
A roar from the courtyard's center cut her off. Aldric had planted himself against the largest hound yet, a monster twice the size of the others, and the two of them were locked together in a blaze of white light. Nathan's mother stood at his side, lips moving in a silent chant that bent the air into a barrier shield.
They were holding. Barely.
"Mira," Nathan said. "Get everyone to the hall. Seal the doors."
"Nathan—"
"*Please.*"
Something in his voice made her obey. She backed away, still staring, and then turned and ran, calling the younger ones to follow.
Nathan stood alone in the torchlight and drew a breath. Then he lifted his eyes, and through the swirling smoke and mist he saw something that made his blood run cold.
On the highest ridge of the northern cliff, perfectly still, a figure in a gray cloak stood watching. Not the beasts. *Him.*
And as Nathan met its gaze, the figure raised one gloved hand and, very deliberately, began to write something in the air.