Chapter 9: The Gray Pass

Lysandra didn't wait for the driver.

She jumped down into knee-deep snow, picked up her skirts and ran toward the torches, with Greta shouting behind her.

The road climbed in a narrow cut between two walls of black rock.

The wind brought her the smell of smoke and blood, and the sound of a battle that was ending.

She came around the last bend and stopped.

The pass floor was full of bodies.

Forty, fifty of them, men in ragged furs and mismatched armor, lying where they had fallen in the trampled snow.

Soldiers in the black-and-silver of Veyrath were walking among them with torches, kicking away weapons.

They were everywhere.

Much more than six.

Along both walls of the pass, on the ledges above the road, there were archers standing at ease with their bows unstrung.

Whatever had happened here, it had gone entirely the Duke's way.

In the middle of the road stood Alaric with a bloody sword in his right hand.

His left hand was bare, whole and perfectly unhurt.

He was talking to a captain in a low voice and he hadn't seen her yet.

Then he did.

She watched the blood leave his face.

He crossed the snow, grabbed her by the upper arms, and shook her once, hard.

"What are you doing here?"

"I came to find you," Lysandra said.

"You came forty leagues in a closed carriage, in winter, on a raiders' road."

"The raiders were here already."

"Do you have any idea," he said, and his voice cracked in the middle, "how close you came to..."

He stopped.

His hands were shaking on her arms.

She had never seen him shake.

"I'm fine," she said. "I'm not hurt. Alaric, you're not hurt."

"No," Alaric said.

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