Page 19 of Bonded By Stone & Blood
She is not a thing I caught. She is not something I own simply because the bond says otherwise.
I stay where I am.
I watch her breathe against the old maps that will help us win a war she had no part in starting. I watch the torchlightmove across her jaw and the faint silver markings along her collarbone.
The bond screams.
I don’t move.
11
SABINE
Ipull my wool coat tighter and focus on not snapping every frozen pine needle beneath my boots. Every step I take sounds catastrophic compared to Tovian and Vorgrym, who move through the frost-bitten dark like they were carved out of it. No crunch. No displaced breath. Just two massive shadows gliding between the tree line ahead of me, stone-gray skin swallowed by the dark so completely that I track them mostly by the faint gleam of Tovian's eyes when he glances back to check I haven't fallen into a ravine.
I hate that he keeps checking. I hate it more that I find it reassuring.
The cold is the biting kind. The kind that crawls under your collar and sinks teeth into your collarbone. My fingers, even inside the gloves, have gone stiff around my lantern handle, and I've stopped trying to hold the light up—Tovian made it clear with one flat look that the flame was a liability. So now it's shuttered, and I'm navigating by moonlight and the occasional slice of frost-white clearing between the pines.
Vorgrym stops first.
He crouches, one hand dropping to the frozen ground, and even that small motion carries the kind of precision that makes my chest tighten. I move up beside him before Tovian can signal me back, and then I smell it.
"What is that?" I whisper.
Tovian's hand closes around my arm, not roughly, but the message is clear. Stay back. He angles my lantern away from the ground and I follow his gaze up—to the tree bark. Gouged deep. Shredded in long, parallel lines far higher than any animal native to these mountains could reach.
I count the sets of marks. Four trees. Five. Eight.
My stomach drops.
"That's not one scout," I say quietly. "That's not even a patrol."
Vorgrym makes a low sound in his chest that isn't quite agreement, but isn't disagreement either.
Tovian's jaw is tight. I can see the muscle working in the torchless dark because I've memorized his face whether I intended to or not. "How many?" he says.
"Enough to cover all four approaches to the valley simultaneously." My eyes move to the spacing between the trees, the direction the gouges face. These marks are fresh. "They're not preparing for a single challenge. They've already encircled us. Tharros and Flora aren't waiting for the dominance trial—they're staging a siege."
The silence between the three of us is the loudest thing in the woods.
The bridge wasold before I was born.
I can tell by the way the stone groans when Vorgrym sets his weight on it. The ravine beneath it is pure black, jagged withupthrust rock that I can hear rather than see, the wind rushing through the chasm below us making a low, hollow moan.
I'm almost across when it gives.
Not all at once. The center section buckles, drops six inches, and then Vorgrym's massive frame punches through a crumbling section of railing and he is gone—except he isn't, because gargoyle reflexes are something else entirely, and his claws catch bare stone, scrabbling for purchase before he disappears entirely.
But only barely.
His single eye is fixed upward, jaw clenched, wings useless at the angle he's hanging—no room to open them, the ravine walls too close, the momentum too sudden. He can't get leverage. His claws are slipping, grinding against ancient stone that crumbles with each second he holds.
Tovian is on the wrong side of the rockfall. I can hear him moving, stone grinding, but he's forty feet away and there isn't forty seconds left.
My pack is off my back before the thought finishes forming. The leather climbing line is already in my hands. I find the nearest trunk with both arms, loop the line twice around it, jam my heels into a frozen root cluster, and throw.
It catches him across the forearm.
