Two days' ride from Silver Hollow, in a cellar beneath a burned-out mill, Thane Voss sat alone in the dark and did not light the lamp.He could have. The flint was right there on the table, next to the map he'd been staring at for an hour without seeing. But the dark felt honest in a way the lamplight didn't. In the dark, he was just an old man in a cellar, hands folded, breath slow. In the light, he'd have to be something else again.The mill had been a grain store once. He remembered it, vaguely, from a summer thirty years back when he'd still bothered to travel this road himself. The smell of it now was wet ash and rot, and underneath that, faintly, something sweet that had probably been barley before it burned. He'd chosen this place because nobody would think to search it. He was beginning to wonder if he'd chosen it because it was the kind of place a man like him deserved to end up.Enough.He straightened. His knees ached. He was sixty-seven years old, and he'd spent the last t
Last Updated : 2026-10-12
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