Morning came gray and cold, and nobody mentioned the marks on Ebony’s chest. She’d buttoned her shirt to the collar before the others were fully awake, and the look she’d given Veronica across the lamplight had said later, or never, and Veronica had chosen to hear never for now.

They put their hoods up in the inn’s doorway. Veronica handed out the papers — five sets of forged documents, pulled from somewhere in her pack with the easy fluency of a woman who had clearly never in her life relied on a single name being true.

"Read your own before you hand it over," she murmured, distributing them. "If the guard asks your trade, you answer with what’s on the page, not what’s in your head. Lucian, you’re a textile buyer. Try to look like you’ve touched cloth before."

"I have excellent taste in cloth."

"Try to look like you’ve paid for it."

The crossing was a stone arch and a bored line of guards and a road that turned to dirt on the far side. Ordinary. Forgettable. For four of them, it was a Tuesday.

For Kanary, it was the edge of the world.

She stood near the back of the group as the line shuffled forward, and Ebony — who under any other circumstances would have spent the morning recovering from a dream that had left two claw marks burned into her skin — noticed the stillness in her before she noticed anything else. Kanary wasn’t nervous the way people are nervous about getting caught. She was nervous the way people are when they are about to do a thing that cannot be taken back.

(She’s leaving her whole life on the wrong side of that arch.) Ebony thought it without sentiment and felt it anyway. (No guards. No mother. No promise she ever sees any of it again. Just us. Just a wanted-poster collection of strangers and a stupid quest and a road.)

She took Kanary’s hand.

She didn’t say anything dramatic about it. She just slid her fingers between the girl’s and gave them a single firm squeeze, the way you’d grip a rope before a drop, and when Kanary looked at her, Ebony jerked her chin toward the arch.

"Come on, governor’s daughter," she said quietly. "Last hard step. Then it’s just walking."

Kanary’s jaw set. She squeezed back.

They crossed together.

The guard glanced at two cloaked women, two laborers and a textile buyer with excellent taste, stamped a ledger without reading it, and waved them through. And then they were on the dirt road, and the kingdom was behind them, and nothing had ended and everything had.

.

.

.

"So." Daniel walked backward in front of the group, which was his preferred way of having a conversation, the way a dog prefers to herd. "We’re across. We’re nobody. We have, between us, no plan and four bounties. What’s the play?"

"North," Ebony said.

"North where?"

"North everywhere. As far north as the world goes, and then a little more." She looked at the gray line of forest ahead of them, the road bending into it. "There’s a tower up there. Blue crystal. It’s where the Eyes of God are hidden." A pause she didn’t fully control. "That’s where we’re going."

Daniel considered this with the gravity of a man receiving an oracle. "I have no idea what that means and I’ve decided to find it exciting."

The merchant left them at the first crossroads — a handshake with Veronica, a nod to the rest, a wagon rolling east while they walked north. He’d done his part. The story he’d tell, if anyone ever asked, was that he’d hired five workers and lost them to better wages, and it would be true enough to survive any questioning.

They walked into the forest, and the road got worse, and the trees got taller, and after a couple of hours of it Kanary asked the question Ebony had been hoping nobody would.

"How do you know where to go?"

"North. I said north."

"You said a tower of blue crystal in a snow desert hiding the Eyes of God." Kanary stepped over a root without breaking stride. "That’s very specific for someone pointing at a direction. Did you study with mages? Is there an order I don’t know about? Because that’s not common knowledge, Ebony, I would know, I studied — "

"She has a point." Veronica’s voice was light, but her eyes weren’t. "I’ve never heard anyone name that tower out loud. How exactly do you know it’s there?"

(Because a fox god whispered it into my ear last night and left claw marks to prove the conversation was real.)

"I read a lot," Ebony said. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

"You read about a secret tower."

"I read about a lot of secret towers, Veronica, it’s a hobby, I’m very mysterious — "

"Lucky thing," Daniel cut in, loud and cheerful and exactly on time, "that we all got out of that sewer with our limbs attached. Well. Most of us. Regulus is short one for at least a few hours of regrowth." He clapped Ebony on the shoulder hard enough to stagger her. "Let’s not interrogate the woman who kept us alive, eh? She’s earned a few secrets."

"Several secrets," Lucian agreed smoothly, falling in on Ebony’s other side. "It’s practically rude to ask. Among elves it’s a capital offense to question someone’s sources before lunch."

"That’s not a real custom," Kanary said.

"It’s an old one."

Ebony shot both of them a look of pure, private gratitude and changed the subject as fast as she could lift it.

"Veronica." She turned to the woman walking beside Kanary. "Are you actually coming with us? All the way?"

"I am." Veronica said it without hesitation. "I’ll see this through. Someone has to keep Kanary alive until she goes home, and I’ve decided that someone is me."

"Why, though?" Ebony genuinely wanted to know. "The two of you — you’ve got a whole history I keep walking into the middle of. How are you this close?"

Kanary and Veronica exchanged a glance, and answered almost at the same time, the way people do when the story is shared property.

"My father," Kanary said.

"Her father," Veronica agreed. "The governor of Sapphire Port hired me to train her. When she was small. Hand-to-hand, blades, a little of everything — the everything she keeps bragging about." A small smile. "I didn’t want the job. I took it because I owed him."

"Owed him what?"

"He helped my own father, once, when it mattered and when no one else would." Veronica’s voice quieted around the edges of it. "The kind of debt you don’t get to refuse when it comes due. So I came to a governor’s mansion to train a spoiled little girl I expected to hate." She glanced sideways at Kanary, and the look was an entire decade of something. "And then I didn’t hate her. And here we are, on a road in the middle of nowhere, and I find I’d rather not forgive myself for whatever happens to her if I’m not standing there to stop it."

"It’s not necessary," Kanary said, with the specific exasperation of someone who has lost this argument before. "I’m grown. I made my own choices. I sealed a pact with a homicidal prince and walked out under my own power, I’ll remind everyone — "

"You had help." Ebony.

"I had minimal help — "

"You had two healers, a water god’s worth of plumbing, and a man who cut his arm off, " Daniel offered.

"Daniel’s help, then, which barely counts — "

"And anyway," Veronica said, sliding the knife in gently, "you only beat the prince because Ebony turned out to be far stronger than she looks. Which, frankly, isn’t difficult. Have you seen her? I assumed she’d snap in a strong wind."

"I held a sword inside my own body to stop it from cutting a teenager in half," Ebony said.

"And you complained the whole time. I heard about it. Very dramatic."

"I will let the next one through."

The group laughed, the loose easy kind that had become, in the space of a single day and night, something that belonged to all of them. The road went on. The forest closed warm and green around them, and for a few hours it was almost possible to forget the posters, the marks, the tower, the fox.

.

.

.

Night came again, and the others slept, and Ebony could not.

It wasn’t the cold or the ground. It was the presence — that was the only word for it — a weight at the back of her skull that hadn’t left since the dream, like a hand resting on the back of her neck that she could feel but never turn fast enough to catch. She lay by the fire for an hour pretending it would pass. It didn’t.

Eventually she gave up, got to her feet, and walked off into the dark to find some privacy and answer the most ordinary need a body has — which was, she reflected sourly, the one thing in this world that didn’t care about gods or towers or destiny.

She didn’t get the chance.

There was a figure on a rock at the treeline, silhouetted against a low fat moon. Lucian, standing perfectly still, his face turned up to the light.

"What are you doing out here?" she asked.

"Keeping watch." He didn’t look down. "Elves don’t need as much sleep as humans. A few hours every few nights. Mostly I just stay up and listen to the dark." A faint smile. "Someone should. It’s a good habit when there are four bounties walking with you."

Ebony climbed up beside him, privacy forgotten, and looked at the moon with him for a moment.

"You’ve changed," she said. "You know that? When I met you, you were the single most arrogant, insufferable elf I’d ever — admittedly the only elf I’d ever — but the bar was low and you went under it." She bumped his shoulder with hers. "You’re easier now. Quieter. I like it. It’s nice having you around when you’re not informing me of your own superiority every nine seconds."

Lucian huffed something that was almost a laugh. "People who survive things together tend to stop performing for each other. I’ve had a year of surviving things with you." He glanced at her. "It’s done me good, I think. You’re a terrible influence and an excellent companion. The combination is rare."

They were both smiling at that — a small, real, comfortable thing — when the sound came.

A crash. Distant, but huge. Wood and metal and something underneath it that wasn’t either, a low resonant note that traveled through the ground as much as the air.

They moved at once, no discussion, slipping down off the rock and through the trees toward the noise, hands near their weapons, every easy thing drained out of the night. The trees thinned. A glow rose ahead through the trunks — firelight, several fires — and they slowed, and crept the last of the distance low to the ground, and looked.

A clearing. A cluster of wagons with heavy iron-barred cages. Fires throwing orange light across a dozen broad, bearded men. And in the cages, packed too tight to turn around, small dragons — fire dragons, scales dull red in the firelight, smoke leaking from their nostrils. The men worked with iron tongs and toothed saws, holding the beasts’ heads still through the bars, and they were cutting. Sawing the horns from the living animals, one rasping stroke at a time, while the dragons screamed.

Ebony and Lucian breathed the same two words at the same moment.

"Dragon traffickers."