Page 9 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

I round the bend and stop.

The snow is torn up across a wide stretch of the path—not cleanly, not the neat prints of deer or mountain cat. The kind of destruction that comes from a fight. Eight wolves, maybe more. And among them, the pale, eyeless cave predators I remember from the cavern—longer limbs, wrong proportions, jaws that don't close right. Several of them. All of them dead.

I crouch beside the nearest wolf. The gash across its flank is massive. The bone beneath is shattered, like something with much larger hands decided the outcome before the fight began.

The predators were heading downhill.

Following scent, warmth, and the fires of a sleeping village that had no idea they were being tracked through the dark.

I stand slowly and my breath fogs white in the cold air.

He was out here last night. While I slept in the cave chamber and told myself I was a prisoner and a victim and that the fastest road back to normal was away from all of this—he was out here in the dark, cutting down anything moving toward Blackstone Valley. Toward Leif. Velka.

I look up at the jagged peaks dissolving into grey mist.

I know he's up there. Watching me stand over the evidence of a mercy he would never admit to. He claimed human blood was an insult to breathe. He said we were fragile animals fit only for guarding, like livestock penned for convenience.

But livestock don't get guardians. Livestock get fences. This was something else.

The plan to run with Leif feels suddenly distant, as if conceived in a different life. There's a weight settling into my chest, a realization that I have chosen a side, and the choosing has already begun to change me.

I turn back toward the mountain, and I start climbing.

6

TOVIAN

The mountain forest is never truly silent—wind moves through pine needles, small things scatter through frost-hardened undergrowth, the cold itself makes noise. But the trees have gone still.

I sense three of them. Moving in a loose spread pattern through the dark below the ridge, trying to use the tree line for cover. Amateur. Their stone-scent is wrong, too pale, too mineral-dry. Not Ashwing. Their wings are folded tight against their backs, a practiced posture that shows they were trained to move through human settlements without being spotted.

I drop from the canopy without a sound.

The first one I take by the throat before his feet leave the ground. The second spins, jaw dropping to call out—my wing clips him across the skull hard enough to buckle his knees. The third bolts. I let him reach almost twenty strides before I land on him from above, pinning him face-down into the frozen earth with one knee between his wings.

I need them breathing.

I drag all three back to the caves by the scruff of their necks like broken hounds. Vorgrym is waiting in the lower chamberwhen I arrive, arms folded, one ruined eye tracking the bodies I drop onto the stone floor with zero ceremony.

"Scouts," he says flatly. He crouches in front of the one still most conscious, the first, whose throat is already bruising black from my grip.

"What territory?" Vorgrym asks him.

The scout spits blood onto the stone.

I close my fist in his collar and drag his face an inch from mine.

"He asked you a question."

"Cragborn holds four peaks now." His voice is cracked but the arrogance underneath it is still intact. Idiots always hold onto their arrogance longest.

"Tharros sends his regards, Ashwing. He says the Blackstone peaks were abandoned. He says unclaimed territory belongs to the first Alpha willing to bleed for it."

Tharros. That single name carries centuries of bad history between us and he knows it as well as I do.

"These peaks were never abandoned."

"You were stone for three centuries." He bares his teeth—chipped, stained, the teeth of something that has been in too many fights. "The world didn't wait for you to wake up."