By morning, the frost was gone.
But the sand remembered. Where it had melted, it left a damp, dark outline on the canyon floor: a man with a spear, stretched long behind the spot where Kai had stood his watch. The sun climbed, and still the shape didn't dry.
Kai showed Veyra before anyone else woke.
She crouched over it for a long time without speaking, which for Veyra was a kind of shouting. Then she pressed two fingers into the damp sand and sniffed them.
"I want your blood," she said. "And I want it near that crate."
"No."
"That wasn't a question, Ghost."
"It was a no."
She looked up at him, eyes bright and hungry. "Something in that box drew the one thing you're missing. Aren't you even a little curious?"
Don't, the voice said. It had been whispering that single word since midnight.
What did you mean last night? What knows you?
No answer. Only the cold, curled tight in his chest like an animal that had heard a bigger one moving in the dark.
When Old Richard limped out to the fire, Kai tried him instead. "The seal. You know it."
Richard poured himself a cup of something that smelled like burnt bark and took his time drinking it.
"Some families bury their secrets," he said finally. "That one ships them."
And that was all he would say.
* * *
The raiders hit them on the fourth day, in a canyon so narrow the wagons scraped stone on both sides.
Twenty-five of them, maybe more, pouring down the slopes with crossbows and hooked spears. Someone in Kharvos or Reiva had talked about the purse, and every cutthroat in the Rift had heard.
"Shields!" Oliver roared. "Front and rear! Don't let them split us!"
The Bedalshiies locked up exactly as he'd drilled them. Bolts hammered into raised shields.
Edrik strolled out from behind the second wagon as if he'd been called to dinner. Three raiders came at him at once. His sword moved three times, lazy and almost careless, and all three were on the ground before Kai had finished turning his head.
Did you see that? the voice hissed. He didn't even shift his feet. Holding back. I keep telling you.
Kai didn't have time to answer. Four raiders came over the lead wagon at him.
For a year, the shadow had only ever answered when he was furious. Now, with Richard's cup of water in his memory, he let the anger slide past and reached for it calmly instead.
It came.
Dark threads ran up the shaft of his spear, quiet and obedient. He thrust once, and the first raider flew backward off the wagon. He turned the spear and swept, and the next two folded. The fourth took one look at the man with no shadow and ran.
Well, the voice said, sounding almost offended. You didn't even need me.
At the rear, Wren tripped over a wagon wheel, fell flat on her face, and apologized to it.
The raider leader, a big man in a bronze helmet bellowing orders from a rock ledge, laughed at her.
Then Wren wasn't on the ground anymore.
Kai never saw her move. One moment she was sprawled in the sand. The next she was standing on the ledge behind the leader, and the big man was toppling forward without a sound, his laugh still on his face.
Wren stared down at her bloody knife. "Oh, n-no, I'm so sorry," she whispered to the corpse. "I-I didn't mean to... well, I did mean to, but..."
Veyra finished it. She stepped out into the open, uncorked a single vial, and flicked it toward the slope where the last raiders were gathering. Green mist bloomed. The screaming stopped almost at once.
And then a different scream started.
One raider had slipped through to the lead wagon in the chaos. He'd torn the tarp aside and grabbed the crate's iron handle, maybe hoping to drag it away.
Now he was on his knees, howling, staring at his hand. It was frozen solid, white to the wrist, the fingers fused to the iron.
Nobody went near him.
In Kai's chest, the cold thing pressed itself as far from the crate as it could go.
* * *
Far to the west, Layla Raytingbergh brought her dragon down onto the rim of the Helverton crater.
Vesper landed hard, wings snapping, and the two younger dragons of her flight circled overhead, restless, hissing down at the crater. Nothing grew around the crater. Even the crows avoided it.
She slid from the saddle, pulled off her riding helm, and shook out her long blonde braid. At twenty-five, she was a peak 4th Star, the finest dragon tamer the Empire had seen in a century, and officially, she was at the northern aeries right now, inspecting hatchlings.
Her mother told the court so whenever anyone asked. Maria, the Royal Noble Consort, had told a great many lies for her this year.
Because Ludvik had forbidden this. Her own brother, the proxy emperor, had looked her in the eye and ordered her never to fly south. The south is lost, he had said. I won't lose you to it too.
Layla still didn't know if he had meant it kindly.
She walked down into the crater. This was where the witnesses swore the third prince had fallen. They had found everyone else: the soldiers, the knights, what the beasts had left. But here, at the bottom of this pit, they had found nothing.
No body. No bones. Nothing at all.
You promised to always come home, she thought. You never break promises. So where are you, Kai?
Vesper screamed a warning.
They came out of the ash all at once: a dozen grey, stitched shapes, each twice the height of a man, with iron collars carved in glowing curse sigils. Death Panel hybrids. A hunting pack, left behind to guard a grave.
Layla was in the saddle before the first one reached the rim.
Vesper launched straight into them. The great dragon's jaws closed on the leader and tore it in half; her tail swept two more off the crater's edge. Above, the younger dragons folded their wings and dived, and twin rivers of fire poured down onto the pack. The hybrids burned and kept coming, because that was what the collars made them do.
Layla rode through the smoke with her blade out, wild and laughing, cutting down anything that climbed toward her flight. Four fell. Seven. Nine.
Then the last three leapt together, straight for Vesper's throat.
Something inside Layla roared.
Heat poured up from deeper than her Taqa had ever reached. Fire burst from her skin, gold and crimson, and her braid burned from blonde to a deep grey-red, as if ash and flame had woven into it. She didn't think. She simply thrust out her hand.
The fire found their collars first. The curse sigils screamed as they burned, threads of black light snapping like cut harp strings, and the three hybrids came apart into falling ash before they ever touched her dragon.
Silence.
Twelve hybrids in less than a minute. Vesper landed on the rim with a rumble of savage satisfaction, and the younger dragons answered from the sky.
But Layla sat frozen in the saddle, staring at her own hands. Her dragons' fire had burned those creatures for a full minute and barely slowed them. Hers had unmade them in a heartbeat.
What was that? What am I?
When she could move again, she knelt beside one of the blackened collars. Half-buried in the ash beside it lay something small: a knot of braided leather and bone, tied in a pattern she had never seen.
She didn't know what it was. But it hadn't come from any soldier of the Empire.
Layla closed her fist around it and walked back to her wounded dragon, carrying two secrets she couldn't explain.
* * *
On the seventh day, the caravan came out of the deep Rift and found a wall of fresh stone across the road.
The watchtower was so new its mortar was still pale. Barazia's lion banner hung from the top. Twenty soldiers in grey cloaks stood across the road with their spears grounded.
"That's the belt," Oliver muttered. "Let me do the talking."
Kai pulled his hood low and drew his sand-scarf over his face, as he always did when the crew met strangers.
The patrol's captain stepped forward. He was the tallest man Kai had ever seen, dark-skinned and broad as a door, with a greatsword strapped across his back that most men couldn't have lifted. Faint tiger-like stripes ran along his bare forearms, and his amber eyes had pupils like narrow slits.
Beast-kin. A natural-born one, not one of the Death Panel's stitched abominations. But Kai heard the muttering ripple down the Bedalshiie line anyway, and he saw the captain hear it too. The man's jaw tightened. He'd clearly heard it all his life.
"Captain Dani Varon, Barazian border watch." His voice was a low rumble. "By order of His Grace the Duke, every armed band in Barazia registers or turns back. Names. Contract. And what's in the box."
"Sealed cargo," Oliver said evenly. "Our code is—"
"I don't care about your code." Varon walked down the line of wagons slowly, studying every face, every weapon. He stopped at the lead wagon and looked at the crate, at the frostbitten raider bandaged in the back, at the white rime still clinging to the iron in the midday heat.
His nostrils flared. Then his slit eyes moved to Kai.
Kai held still.
Varon looked at the scarf. At the hood. And then, slowly, he looked down at the road beneath Kai's feet, where the noon sun lay bright and unbroken across the stones.
Twenty soldiers. Thirty mercenaries. Six wagons. Every one of them cast a shadow on that road except one.
The captain's hand rose to the hilt of his greatsword.
"You," Dani Varon said quietly. "Take off the scarf."