Chapter 14: The Braid Remembers

Rorik's POV

We reached the east slope at dusk on the night before the full moon.

Two hundred wolves went quiet under the pines, and I walked up to the ridge to look at the Stone alone.

Joren wanted to come.

I told him to stay at the tree line and watch the road.

The wind on the bare rock was cold and steady.

Harlan's scouts had been through that afternoon, and the grass still showed their boot marks.

The Stone stood where the ridge flattened, taller than two men, split down one side by some old lightning.

I had never seen it in my life.

I knew it anyway.

I knew which side the crack ran on before I came around the rock.

I stopped three paces off with my hand on my sword.

Something in my chest had gone loud, a thump behind the scar that Sabine had found with her hand.

"It's a rock," I said aloud.

It did not answer.

I made myself walk up to it, and I laid my palm flat on the cold stone.

The world went white.

It was raining, and I was on my knees in the grass with something warm running down my back.

I could not feel my legs.

I knew what it was.

An arrow had gone in under the shoulder blade and out through the lung, and I was drowning in the rain on the oath ridge, and I did not care.

Sabine was holding my face.

She was younger.

There was no white in her hair at all, and she was screaming my name.

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