Page 34 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

My scouts deliver each report with the same tight jaw, the same carefully controlled stillness they've learned to wear around me since the war began. They are trying not to give me anything to rage at.

I stare at the territorial map spread across the war table and feel the pattern assemble itself behind my eyes like a slow, inevitable collapse.

"They aren't testing us," I say aloud.

Vorgrym, standing at my right shoulder, doesn't respond immediately. He is reading the same map. He reaches the same conclusion three seconds after I do—I watch him arrive there by the slight hardening around his good eye.

"They're bleeding us," he says.

"Systematically." I trace the attack points with one claw. None of these skirmishes are accidents. None of them are impulsive territorial aggression. Each strike lands at a different loyal Ashwing outpost, each one calculated to pull our warriors in opposite directions before the real blow comes. "Tharros is not fighting a war. He is engineering a collapse."

Sabine is already at the table when I look up, her eyes moving across the map. She points to the gap between the Hollowed Pass and the ridge without being asked. "They're funneling your forces away from the valley's northern approach."

She doesn't gloat about being right. She just looks at me, waiting.

I face the tent. Vorgrym. Sabine. Leif, pale but standing straight with his hammer-callused hands balled at his sides. Velka with her arms crossed and her jaw set like quarried stone.

"Full-scale strike is coming," I tell them. "Days. Maybe fewer. Every skirmish tonight was designed to exhaust and scatter. They will hit while we are still reacting."

Leif speaks first, which surprises me. "Then I'll work through the night. The eastern gate brackets need reinforcing. I can have the hinges reforged by morning."

Velka drops her arms. "My squad doubles the perimeter rotation. If they're sending scouts ahead of the main force, we find them before they find us."

Vorgrym says nothing. He simply begins rolling the map.

I look at Sabine last. She is watching me.

"Then we don't sleep," she says.

The camp fractures into motion. Outside, I can hear the rhythm of it beginning—hammer strikes on iron, the rasp of gargoyle talons drawn across volcanic bedrock to sharpen edges, the low disciplined commands of Ashwing warriors moving through the dark. Two races, sharpening themselves against the same stone. It should not be remarkable. Somehow it is.

Midnight finds us on the high ledge above the camp.

I didn’t plan this. I came to check the northern sightline. Sabine followed because she follows when she decides to, and I have accepted that arguing costs more energy than it returns. The snow is falling in slow, dense curtains now, muffling the world below until the valley fires look like embers seen through frosted glass. We are the only two things alive on this particular edge of the mountain.

She stands close to my left side—closer than necessary—her breath fogging in small white clouds that disappear almost instantly in the cold.

The silence stretches long enough that I think she might leave it alone.

She doesn't.

"Did you have a mate?" she asks. "Before."

I tip my chin down at her. "What made you think I did?"

She keeps her eyes on the valley. "The way you talk sometimes, about those you lost… I thought it was a mate."

"The ones you are thinking of," I say, "were my sister and comrades."

Sabine glances up then, clearly surprised.

"Tovyos was young. Barely through her combat trials, still had the rawness of a new warrior about her, that particular arrogance that comes before the first real wound teaches you better. She used to follow me everywhere. I could not turn around without finding her perched somewhere nearby, usually with an opinion she had not been asked for."

"Sharp-tongued?"

"Insufferably."

Sabine makes a quiet sound that is almost a smile. "I think I would have liked her."