3.5 KiB
By midday, the sky had cleared to a brittle blue, though the wind off the Mourning Peaks carved through Ryn’s cloak like knives, cold enough to numb thought. She walked the upper battlements beside Commander Vessan, past shuttered watchtowers and half-mended merlons. The frost-stained stone groaned beneath their boots—ancient Talpian masonry, too long left to sleep.
Below, the broken city struggled toward life. Smoke rose thin from repaired chimneys. Old banners had been torn down or cut into strips for bandages. Winter’s Edge had once been a stop for herders and scouts, little more than a fortress-keep with stables and storm shelters dug into the cliffs. Now it was bloated with the weight of the war—refugees, loyalists, deserters, all pressed against one another like too many stones in a dry wall.
“The place wasn’t meant to live,” said Vessan. Her voice was flat, scraped raw by years and wind. “Winter’s Edge was for passing through. Not for holding.”
Telaryn studied her. Vessan was older than she’d first seemed—wiry beneath boiled leathers, streaks of white threading dark hair bound back in a knot. A jagged scar split her cheek. Her sword was plain but well-kept, the blade honed to a razor. Not ceremonial, not for show.
“How many do you command?” Telaryn asked, eyes drifting to the outer palisades.
“Sixty trained,” Vessan said after a pause. “Maybe. If you count the ones who still have both arms and a decent spear. Add another hundred who can follow an order without pissing themselves.”
Telaryn exhaled slowly.
“And stores?”
“Low.” Vessan rubbed her gloved fingers together, warming them. “We’ve got three weeks of grain, two if you ration it hard. Salted goat, turnips, dried root. No oil. No engineers. No siege ladders unless the ghosts in the cellar start building them.” She glanced toward the cliffside where a rudimentary wall had been thrown up with mud and prayer. “If the passes close early, we’ll eat leather before winter’s end.”
They stopped at a crumbled parapet. From here, the broken northern curtain wall was visible—cracked along the seams, its silver-veined ward-stone faded from centuries of disuse. Men were trying to reinforce it with logs and hastily quarried stone. Children ferried firewood, their eyes wide.
“You brought something, when you came,” Vessan said, watching them. “Hope, maybe. Or a symbol. But I don’t know if it was mercy… or a curse.”
“I didn’t ask to lead,” Telaryn said.
“No one who’s worth it ever does.”
The silence stretched. Snow fell quietly now, soft and clean. From up here, the mountains looked peaceful—folded in white, wrapped in stillness. But Telaryn knew better. She felt them watching, the spirits of old stone, the slumbering things that remembered when blood last stained these heights.
Her hand rested on the wall. The frost-bitten surface pulsed faintly beneath her palm. Veins of silver—woven into the old Talpian stones—still shimmered with spirit-warding, though the glow was weak. This place had once been part of a chain of citadels bound by oaths and ritual, meant to withstand not just armies but darker tides.
“I’ll hold this place,” she said, soft as falling snow. “As long as I can.”
Vessan studied her in silence. When she spoke, her voice had lost its rough edge.
“The stones remember lies, Princess. But they remember oaths even longer.”
Telaryn didn’t answer.
Instead, she stared east, toward the pass. Somewhere beyond the fog, beyond the white-shrouded peaks, the Legion moved.