Page 48 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

Velka snorts quietly. "I like her more every hour."

Tovian says nothing. He settles his hand on my lower back, then withdraws it. But I felt it, and from the way Vorgrym's eye narrows, so did he.

We move quickly into the operational brief. I spread the old hunters' map across a flat stone and press my thumb against the ridge line cutting northeast behind the enemy camp. Forgotten trail. Too narrow for gargoyle wingspans, too overgrown for any patrol bothering to look past the main approach.

"We take the vanguard," I tell Vorgrym. "You and Tovian follow the lower tree line and cover the eastern flank. If any aerial scouts break early, that's your problem."

Vorgrym looks at me for a long beat. Then he looks at the map. Then back at me.

"She's right," he says finally. "The ridge approach is sound."

Velka tips her head toward him with an expression of pure, weaponized delight. "Did it hurt," she whispers loudly, "taking orders from a gravekeeper?"

Vorgrym bares his teeth at her. She grins back, unbothered, and I love her for it.

The ghost trail earns its name. It is barely a trail at all — a suggestion of flattened earth beneath decades of overgrowth, winding through jagged rock and black-needled pine so dense the sky disappears entirely overhead.

Velka moves through it like she was born here, silent and precise, her hand signals crisp and economical. I keep pace two steps behind, reading the terrain ahead, watching for the amber leak of firelight through the trees.

We don't speak for a long stretch. Then Velka glances sideways at me.

"So," she says, voice barely above a breath. "The rumors."

I don't look at her. "No."

"I'm just asking."

"You're always just asking."

She's quiet for a few seconds, then: "You were in that tunnel a long time, Sabine."

"There was a rockslide."

"There was a rockslide," she repeats, like she's tasting the excuse. "Right. And the rumors?"

"Are none of your business."

The corner of her mouth pulls up. She faces forward again.

Another stretch of silence. Then, so quietly I almost miss it: "So they're true then."

The enemy camp resolves out of the dark in increments — first the smell, raw meat and sulfur and beneath both, a mineral ancientness I've come to recognize as concentrated gargoyle musk, animal and territorial and utterly inhuman. Then the shapes. Silhouettes massive enough to block the stars. Tharros's elite warriors move between torchlit tents in slow, arrogant patrols, and the casual certainty in their movements makes my stomach drop.

They're not afraid. They have no reason to be afraid.

We're about to give them one.

Velka touches my arm. Points. Below the main tent cluster, the earth drops in a series of cut trenches — makeshift holding pens dug directly into frozen ground and sealed with heavy iron grating. I scan until I find him.

Leif.

He's sitting upright in the trench despite the shackles. His face is a mess of bruising but his spine is straight.

I signal Velka. She nods.

Then Tovian and Vorgrym hit the eastern flank like a controlled detonation, and the camp erupts.

Tharros's warriors respond in seconds — too fast, too coordinated — and the camp transforms into a collision of massive bodies and drawn weapons, stone skin cracking against drakestone blades, the ground shuddering under forces that have nothing human about them.