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CHAPTER 36
publish date:
2026-05-10 18:08:55
Latest chapter
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 73
ZaneWe wrapped Maren in her own cloak and tied her across her horse, because you don't leave anyone in that country, not even to the warm grass, and we turned north out of Orsel's little circle of summer back into the cold we'd crossed to get here.Wren wouldn't let anyone else lead Maren's horse. She took the rein and walked, and nobody argued, and that was the funeral. A girl walking a dead woman's horse out of hell, dry-eyed.Amara rode in the middle of us, quiet but here, present, her hand off her neck. The grave had done something. She'd come back up off that warm stone changed, steadier, like touching Orsel had shown her the worst and the worst turned out to be survivable, at least to look at. I let myself feel almost good for half a day.Then, around noon, she made a sound and folded over her own saddle horn like she'd been hit.I had her before she came off the horse. "What. What is it.""Greywater." Her face had gone white and far away. "The cold's there. It's there now. I c
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 72
SelaThe cold reached Greywater on the fifth night they were gone.I was awake because the leg doesn't let me sleep much, and because somebody has to be awake when everybody else is pretending the quiet is restful and not the held breath it actually is. I was up on the wall-walk with a blanket and a bad attitude when the river stopped.You'd think a river stopping would be loud. It's the opposite. One moment there's the sound a river makes, and the next there's nothing. I looked down and the water had gone to gray glass under the moon, edge to edge, in the time it took me to notice."Rell!" I don't have a fighting body anymore but I've still got the loudest mouth in any building. "RELL. River's froze. It's here."She was on the wall before the echo died.We did the things. We'd drilled the things a dozen times against the chance and now the chance was a wall of white coming up off the ice into the lower town, and the things were: fire and people behind fire and the weak in the middle.
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 71
WrenWe propped Maren against the warm stone with her legs out in the green grass, and for a moment the heat of it gave her back a little color, enough to lie to myself with.She ran her fingers over the face of the stone, by touch, her eyes half shut. There was writing on it. Not letters I knew. Old marks, worn soft, and Maren read them with her fingertips and her lips moved and her face fell, piece by piece."What does it say," Amara said. She'd knelt in the grass across from Maren, close to the stone, and the warmth had brought the human color back to her face too. For the first time in three days she didn't have her hand on the back of her neck."It says her name. Orsel. And under it..." Maren's fingers stopped on a mark. "Under it the word for held. Not died. Not rests. Held. Present. Still happening." She looked up, and her eyes were wet and afraid. "Wren. She's not buried here. There's nobody in the ground. The stone isn't a marker. It's a door, and she's behind it, and she's b
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 70
WrenMaren couldn't sit the horse at all by morning, so we made a sling of two cloaks between my saddle and Seraphine's and carried her between us, and she let us, which told me more than her gray face did. Maren fought help right up until the day she didn't. I'd seen Edda do the same. You learn the look."Don't bury me out here," she said, somewhere in the worst of the morning. Her eyes were shut. I'd thought she was sleeping. "If it comes to it. Don't put me in this ground. It keeps what you give it. I'll not be a soldier in its yard.""You're not dying out here," I said, which was a lie, and she knew it was a lie."Get me to the grave," she said. "That's all I'm for now. Get me there and prop me up and I'll read it if I have to do it dead."The land had stopped being land. That's the only way I know to say it. By midmorning there was no green thing anywhere, no brown thing, only the white of frost and the black of what the cold had killed standing, and the silence had a pressure to
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 69
AmaraBy the third day in the dead ground, Maren couldn't ride more than an hour without Wren walking beside her stirrup with a hand on her knee to keep her in the saddle, and the weight on the back of my neck had stopped being a coin and started being a hand again, the way it was the night it first reached me. The closer we got to the grave, the closer it got to me.We made camp in a hollow ringed with dead birches, white trunks like a fence of bones.Maren went down as soon as we got her off the horse. Bram had sent broth-makings and Wren had the pot on before I'd finished my own count of the dark, and the old woman ate a little and slept, and her breath was a thin thread I could feel from across the fire."She's not going to make it back," I said. Quiet. To Aldric, who'd taken the first watch beside me."She knows that. She came anyway." He fed a branch to the fire. "Don't carry it for her. She'd be insulted."Zane took the far side of the ring, then gave up pretending he'd stay th
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 68
SeraphineWe left before dawn, six of us, while the cold was still a half-day off and the gate could still be opened without letting winter in. Six against a thing that had frozen a town standing up. I'd have laughed if I'd had it in me.Amara. The two brothers. Maren, who should have been in a bed and was instead being helped onto a horse by Wren, who was coming because she could read ground and because she'd refused to be left. And me. Because I knew the roads.That was the cold truth of why I was the sixth. I knew the roads south of here better than anyone breathing, because I'd built half of them, moving Corvus's strength from one swallowed pack to the next for eleven years. The dead ground had been my work before it was my grave to visit. Rell looked at me when the party was named and I looked back and we both knew she was sending the one person who could find the way and also the one person who'd have to walk back into every place she'd helped make.Sela came down to the gate to
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 67
AldricBy the second evening the cold had reached the bend in the river you could see from the tower, and I stood up there with Rell and watched a line of white come down the valley at a walking pace, slow, and tried to make a plan out of a thing you can't fight with a plan."We can't hold a wall a
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 66
BramThey came in off the north road at first light, eleven of them, and I knew before they reached the gate that I'd lose some.They were from Two Creeks. A mill town, a day and a half north, never anybody's enemy, never worth taking. Two Creeks had nothing the dead want except warmth, and warmth,
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 65
WrenWe didn't stay the night in the dead woman's house. Maren wouldn't, and I didn't push it.We made a mile and stopped in a stand of pines and laid no fire, on Maren's word, and sat in the dark with our backs to the trees. She had the new knot closed in her fist the whole way. It was the only th
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 64
ZaneAmara slept past dawn for the first time since I'd known her, and that scared me more than the dead had.She didn't sleep. She powered down. She lay on the cot in the corner of Rell's hall and didn't move, and the new white streak in her hair caught the morning light, and I sat on the floor ne
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