The first thing the House Thornvlad assassins brought was snow.
It arrived the night before they did, sweeping down from the Aldric Mountains on a wind that smelled of altitude and old stone. By morning Blackthorn wore a thin white coat that muffled the construction noise and turned the walkways treacherous and made the resident spiders, who had until that moment been indifferent to weather, deeply opinionated about cold. Julius had retreated to the warmest gallery in the dungeon and communicated his displeasure through the congress at a frequency that Jack's Telepathy registered as a sustained minor grievance.
Jack was in the courtyard reviewing supply manifests when Zero found him. She materialised from the shadow of the eastern wall with the characteristic abruptness that the guards had stopped flinching at somewhere around day four.
