Page 32 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

She steps in front of me.

Not away. Not beside. In front — between my bloodstained body and the terrified faces gathered at the threshold — and she keeps her blade visible and her chin raised and she says nothing. She simply stands there, and the meaning is clean and unmistakable.

I have never known what it feels like to be claimed in return.

My eyes take her in, standing amid the carnage with blood drying on her jaw and fire in her eyes, and I feel — for the first time since the mountain swallowed me alive — something that is not grief, and not rage, and not hunger.

I feel seen.

17

SABINE

"Crane crew, I need that second beam braced before the next rotation!" Velka shouts from somewhere to my left, her voice carrying over the ring of axes like she was born giving orders in a forest. Maybe she was.

I mark another section on the rough map spread across the supply crate and call across to the group of blacksmiths from the valley who are shoulder-to-shoulder with a pair of Ashwing gargoyles twice their size. "The deadfall line needs to run further east. If Tharros's scouts use the same ridge approach from last time, we want them hitting the trigger before they have eyes on the tent line."

The older blacksmith, Henrek, squints at me. Three weeks ago he would have sooner spat at my boots than take direction from a gravekeeper girl. Now he just nods and relays the instruction without comment.

Progress, I think. Ugly, grudging, life-threatening progress. But still.

The camp sprawls through the mountain woods in organized chaos — eleven days into the siege now and it shows: canvas tent scattered everywhere, cook fires snapping in stone-ringed pits,and gargoyles crouched low along the high ridgeline in rotating patrol formations that Tovian personally set before dawn.

I watched him do it. Watched him assign each patrol with the efficiency of a commander who has been winning territorial wars since before my grandmother's grandmother was born. No wasted words. No ceremony. Just a pointed finger and a look that nobody in their right mind argues with.

Nobody except me. And only sometimes. I'm not reckless.

A low, reverberating grunt rolls through the air as two gargoyle soldiers — enormous, dark-skinned, with wings folded tight against their backs — haul a pine timber the size of a small bridge into position against the northern defence wall. The human carpenters flanking them don't flinch anymore. That itself feels like a small miracle.

The skirmishes start midmorning.

Tharros's scouts hit the eastern perimeter first. No warning — just a guttural screech from the ridge and then the hiss of crossbow bolts punching through canvas. I don't think. I move.

"Wall crews, fall back to the secondary line! Archers up!"

Velka is already sprinting past me in the opposite direction, axe drawn, copper skin catching the pale light. She grins at me as she passes. "Finally," she says, like she's been waiting for an excuse.

What follows is brutal and short and, in its strange way, clarifying.

A gargoyle soldier takes a bolt to the wing joint — I hear the crack of it — and staggers sideways into the timber scaffolding. Before the human crew beside him can scatter, Daven, a young archer from the valley who barely shaves, steps into the gap and covers the gargoyle's exposed flank with three quick shots that send the enemy scouts scrambling. The gargoyle looks down at him. Daven looks up. Neither of them says a word. The gargoylerights himself, rolls his injured wing once, and continues fighting.

That is how it happens. Not with a speech. Not with a treaty. With Daven and a borrowed quiver of arrows and a gargoyle who didn't let him die.

Later, when a section of rock face gives way above the digger crews, it is a gargoyle wing that sweeps the largest boulder clear. A human woman shouts her thanks in a voice still shaking with adrenaline. The gargoyle dips its scarred head. A fragile understanding cracks open in the air between the two groups — tentative, necessary, and new.

By the time the skirmish is contained and the perimeter is reset, I am standing at the eastern wall running a headcount of my section when I realize Vorgrym is standing three feet to my right.

I don't startle anymore at a gargoyle appearing silently from nowhere. This is what my life is now.

He says nothing for a moment. Just looks out over the digger crews with that single ruined eye, slate-dark and unreadable. Then he turns his massive, scarred head toward me and dips it — slowly, deliberately.

"Your eastern line held," he says.

"It held because your people covered the break."

"They covered it because they were told to trust the line you set."

I don't know what to do with that coming from Vorgrym, so I just nod back and return to my map before either of us makes it awkward.