The world beyond the beacons was a different realm. It obeyed older, harsher laws. The trails William and his eight companions followed were not paths, but suggestions made by deer and runoff, winding through a labyrinth of wind-scoured rock and skeletal pines. The air was thinner here, bitingly cold even in the day, carrying the lonely cry of eagles and the constant, whispering threat of the wind. They moved with a silence born of necessity, their progress measured not in miles, but in the careful avoidance of sound and sign. Elric led, his hunter's eyes reading the ground for traces no one else could see: a dislodged pebble, a bent blade of hardy grass, the faintest scrape on lichen.
William moved as one of them, the weight of his lordship left behind at the gate. Here, his authority stemmed from his ability to keep up, to make no mistakes, to share the watch in the freezing dark. The poppet Anya had given him was a small, hard lump against his chest, a constant, accusatory reminder of their purpose. He saw the girls' faces in his mind, not as the vague shapes of subjects, but with a painful clarity: Maren, with her father Grigg's stubborn jaw, and Lissa, small and quiet, who had hidden behind her sister's skirts when he first visited Stoneford.
They traveled by night, sheltering by day in shallow caves or dense thickets of pine, huddled together for warmth. Speech was sparing, conducted in murmurs or hand signals. Korbin's grandsons, twins named Derran and Col, proved invaluable. They had the mountain sense of their grandfather, an instinct for terrain that bordered on preternatural. On the third night, as they prepared to move, Derran pointed to a distant, almost invisible thread of smoke against the indigo sky, far to the northeast.
"A steading fire," Elric whispered, squinting. "Too deep for shepherds this time of year. In the lee of that peak, see? The one that looks like a broken tooth. That's Borrell land. The high valleys start there."
The map in William's mind shifted, gaining a point of grim reference. The Broken Tooth. The name suited the jagged, malevolent peak. They altered their course, the journey becoming a cautious, radial approach towards the plume of smoke. The land grew even more hostile, a chaos of granite shoulders and deep, shadowed clefts. Twice, they had to backtrack to avoid sheer drops that appeared out of the gloom. Once, they froze for an hour as a patrol of rough-clad men passed a hundred yards below their perch, their voices carrying easily on the thin air. They spoke of hunting, of a "skinflint master," and of "the southern lord who thinks his walls can keep us out." William's hand tightened on his sword hilt. They were close.
On the fifth night, from a rocky outcrop, they saw their objective. Nestled in a high, hidden bowl beneath the Broken Tooth was a steading—a fortified farmhouse of dark timber and sod, surrounded by a handful of outbuildings and a crude, wooden palisade. A single, greasy yellow light burned in a window. From their vantage, they could see figures moving in the yard, and hear the faint, forlorn bleating of goats.
"A nest," Elric murmured, his voice barely audible. "Four, maybe five men visible. Could be more inside. The girls will be in there, or in one of the sheds."
William studied the layout. A frontal assault was madness. The palisade, while crude, was a barrier. An alarm raised here would bring the entire region down on them. They needed to be ghosts, as they had been on Blackcliff's cliff. But this time, they weren't opening a gate for an army; they were extracting two precious, fragile lives.
"We wait for the darkest hour," William decided. "Elric, Derran, with me. We go over the wall at the rear, where the shadow of the peak is deepest. Col, take the others and position yourselves here, at the mouth of this draw. If you hear a sustained alarm, if they manage to light a beacon, you are to retreat immediately. Do not engage. Your only task is to get word back to Blackcliff."
"And leave you?" Col's young face was pale with protest.
"Your loyalty is to the fief, not to me," William said, his voice allowing no argument. "If this fails, Blackcliff must know what happened. Its lord cannot simply vanish. Now, rest. We move in three hours."
The wait was an agony of cold and anticipation. William ran through the plan again and again, visualizing every step, every potential disaster. He thought of the raider on the road, of the cold calculus that had delivered him to justice. This was different. This was stealth and precision, with innocent lives as the stakes. The lordly detachment he had cultivated felt like a brittle shell here. He was terrified.
When the moon finally dipped behind the Broken Tooth, plunging the bowl into profound darkness, they moved. They were three shadows flowing down the rocky slope. Elric found the route, a path of broken scree and clinging roots that led them to the very base of the palisade. The wood was rough-hewn and strong, but the ground was uneven. William boosted Elric, who slithered over the top like a serpent, dropping silently inside. A moment later, a coiled rope, darkened with soot, snaked back over. William and Derran followed.
The yard was a patch of deeper blackness. The smell of dung, woodsmoke, and unwashed humanity was thick. They could hear snoring from the main house and the restless shifting of animals in a pen. Elric pointed to a low, windowless shed near the back of the compound, its door secured by a heavy wooden bar. It was the kind of place used to store tools, or prisoners.
William nodded. He gestured for Derran to watch the house door. He and Elric crept to the shed. The bar was thick, but not locked. They lifted it together, the scrape of wood on wood sounding like a thunderclap in the stillness. They froze. The snoring within the house hitched, then resumed.
William pulled the door open. The smell that wafted out was of damp straw, sweat, and despair. By the faint starlight filtering in, he saw two huddled shapes in the corner, chained by the ankle to a rusted iron ring in the wall. They stirred, shrinking back, a whimper of fear stifled quickly.
"Maren? Lissa?" William whispered, his voice strange and thick. "Quiet. We're from Blackcliff. We're taking you home."
A moment of stunned silence. Then a choked sob. "Lord Marren?" It was Maren's voice, cracked and disbelieving.
"Yes. Can you walk?"
"They… the chain."
Elric was already at work, a small, wicked file in his hand, working silently at the ancient, pitted iron links. It was agonizingly slow. Every rasp of metal seemed to scream. William stood guard at the door, his every sense screaming. He heard a cough from the house, the sound of someone turning over.
The file bit through. One link parted with a faint ping. Elric moved to the second chain. Just as it gave way, the door of the main house creaked open. A bulky silhouette filled the doorway, scratching itself. A man stepping out to relieve himself.
He took two steps into the yard, then stopped, peering into the gloom. He was looking directly towards the open shed door. William's blood turned to ice. He was ten paces away, backlit by the dim hearth light from the house. There was no time for stealth.
William stepped forward, out of the shed's shadow, placing himself between the man and the girls. "Looking for something?" he said, his voice calm, a gambler's bluff in the dark.
The man grunted in surprise, then roared, "Intruders!" He fumbled for the axe at his belt.
William was on him before the cry fully left his lungs. It was not a duel; it was a savage, close-quarters eruption of violence. He drove his shoulder into the man's chest, silencing the shout, his dagger finding the gap between rib and belt. The man heaved, a wet gasp, and crumpled. But the damage was done.
Lights flared in the house. Shouts. The steading was awake.
"Run!" William hissed, turning back to the shed. Elric was already ushering the two girls, weak and stumbling, out into the yard. "To the rope! Now!"
They sprinted across the open ground. A man burst from the house, saw them, and bellowed. An arrow whistled past William's ear, thudding into a timber post. They reached the wall. Elric vaulted up, turned, and hauled Lissa up with terrifying strength. Derran boosted Maren. William was last. As he turned to grab the rope, a second man rounded the corner of the house, a hunting bow drawn.
William threw himself to the side as the arrow released. It grazed his thigh, a line of fire, before he found the rope and hauled himself up, muscles screaming. He tumbled over the palisade just as another arrow splintered the wood where his head had been.
"Go! Go! Go!" Elric was already leading the girls up the slope, a supporting arm around each. William followed, his leg burning, the coppery taste of adrenaline and failure in his mouth. They had been seen. They were known.
They scrambled back up the treacherous slope as shouts and torches erupted in the steading below. A horn blew, a raw, bleating sound that echoed cruelly off the surrounding crags. It was answered, faintly, from another direction. The alarm was spreading.
They reached Col and the others at the draw. There was no time for words. "They're alerted. Horns. We need distance, now!" William gasped.
The return journey became a desperate, grueling flight. They could not move with ghostly silence anymore; speed was their only ally. They half-carried, half-dragged the exhausted girls over the brutal terrain. William's wounded leg stiffened, each step a jolt of pain. Behind them, the horn sounded again, closer. Their pursuers knew these lands. They were hunters, and William's party was now the prey.
Dawn found them exhausted, sheltering in a shallow cave high on a windswept ridge. They could see movement in the valleys below—small, dark clusters of men spreading out, searching. They were being encircled.
"We cannot outrun them back to the border," Col said, his face grim. "Not with the girls. And they'll have riders on the easier trails to cut us off."
William looked at Maren and Lissa. Their faces were pinched with cold and terror, but there was a fierce hope in Maren's eyes that broke his heart. He had gotten them out of the cage only to lead them into a larger trap. He had acted from compassion and incurred a strategic disaster. Daerlon would hear of this. The Borrell cousins would have a legitimate grievance: a royal lord leading a raid into their territory. He had given them the casus belli they lacked.
"Then we don't run for the border," William said, his mind racing over the mental map. "We go higher."
"Higher?" Derran asked, aghast. "There's nothing up there but the Tooth and the ice fields."
"Precisely," William said, a desperate plan forming. "They'll expect us to run for home. We'll go where they won't follow, where they think we'll die. Over the shoulder of the Broken Tooth itself."
It was madness. The passes around the Tooth were notorious, glaciers scarred with crevasses, swept by katabatic winds that could freeze a man solid in minutes. But it was the only direction not yet swarming with searchers.
They spent the day in the cave, conserving strength, watching the search patterns below. William let Elric clean and bind his leg wound. It was shallow but ugly. As Elric worked, William saw the doubt in his friend's eyes, not in the plan, but in the cost.
"I miscalculated," William admitted quietly, so the girls wouldn't hear. "I thought only of the rescue. Not of the consequence."
"You did what a lord should do," Elric replied, tightening the bandage. "Now do what a survivor must. Get us home. The consequence can be faced later. If we live."
At nightfall, under a sky blazing with indifferent stars, they began the ascent. This was no climb of chosen holds and careful planning; it was a forced march into a frozen hell. The wind screamed down from the peaks, carrying stinging particles of ice. The ground turned from rock to hard-packed snow, then to treacherous ice. They tied themselves together with ropes, moving in a grim, stumbling chain. Maren and Lissa, driven by a desperate will to live, found reserves of strength that astonished William.
They navigated by the stars and the looming, ominous bulk of the Broken Tooth. Twice, they had to detour around yawning crevasses, their depths a blue-black nothingness. Derran, probing ahead with a spear, broke through a snow bridge up to his waist, saved only by the rope. The cold was a living entity, seeping through furs, numbing fingers and toes, stealing the very will to move.
Just before dawn, as they traversed a steep ice slope, the consequence of William's wounded leg arrived. His foot, numb with cold, slipped. He fell heavily, his weight jerking on the rope, pulling Col and Lissa off their feet. For a terrifying second, the entire party slid towards a drop-off lost in the gloom below. Elric and Derran, at the anchors, dug in with axes and sheer desperation, the ropes cutting into their hands. The slide stopped, but William was dangling over the edge, his injured leg screaming in protest, his fingers scrambling for purchase on the ice.
He looked up. Elric's face, a mask of strain and fear, was outlined against the paling sky. He looked down into the abyss. This was it. The fall of the ambitious lord, not in battle or court, but as a frozen corpse in a nameless crevasse, dragging his people with him. The absurdity of it almost made him laugh.
Then he felt the poppet, still tucked in his tunic, pressed against the ice. Lissa. He thought of the hope in Maren's eyes. Not like this.
With a guttural roar that tore from his frozen lungs, he kicked his good leg against the ice wall, finding a tiny lip. He hauled, hand over hand on the rope, his arms burning. Elric and Derran pulled, veins standing out on their temples. Inch by agonizing inch, he crawled back over the lip, collapsing onto the safer ice, gasping air that felt like shattered glass.
No one spoke. They untangled themselves, checked for injuries, and moved on. Words were a currency they could no longer afford. The rising sun revealed a breathtaking, deadly vista: a world of white and blue and blinding grey rock, utterly devoid of life. And there, far below on the slopes they had climbed, they saw tiny, ant-like figures—their pursuers, halted at the edge of the ice field, looking up. They would go no further. The mountain had drawn its line.
Two more days of hellish travel brought them, broken and frostbitten, to a high, remote pass that marked the southern boundary of the Borrell Marches and the northern extremity of William's own fief. They stumbled past a crude cairn that marked the border, collapsing on the safe side. They were alive. They were home.
A week later, William sat once more in the high chair of Blackcliff Keep. A fire roared in the hearth. Maren and Lissa were safe with their aunt Anya in Stoneford, recovering under the watchful shadow of the tower that bore their hamlet's name. His leg was healing. The mine captains reported the first substantial haul of raw silver ore.
But a different cold had settled in him. A rider had come from the capital, bearing a sealed missive from the king's marshal, Valerius. It was brief and cutting.
Lord Marren,
Reports have reached the throne of an armed incursion by men under your banner into the territory of the Borrell kin, resulting in deaths and the theft of property. The Borrells demand restitution and your presence to answer for the breach of the king's peace. Your previous service is remembered, but your recent judgment is questioned. You will present yourself at the autumn court to give account. Stabilize your frontier. Do not test our patience further.
—Valerius, Marshal of the Realm.
He had saved two lives and ignited a diplomatic firestorm. He had proven he could be a protector and in doing so, had shown himself to be a dangerous liability. Daerlon would be waiting at the autumn court, smiling his thin smile. The Borrells would be there, baying for blood or compensation.
William looked out at his three beacon fires, glowing in the night. They marked a safe circle, a kingdom of stone and resolve. But he had stepped outside that circle. He had learned that some debts of honor could bankrupt a lord politically. The Unforgiving Mountain had sheltered its lost lambs, but the cost was a cliff-face of a different kind, one he would have to climb before the assembled court, with the eyes of the kingdom upon him. The rescue was over. The reckoning was just beginning. He had found the part of him that could still bleed. Now, he would see if that same blood would be the price of his throne.