CROWN OF GLASS AND ASH
Ren rode a length ahead of me now, his attention fixed on the road with the particular intensity I'd come to recognize as his working mind, cataloguing every rise and fall of the land for cover, for ambush, for the dozen small dangers a soldier's training taught a man to see in landscape that looked, to my own untrained eye, like nothing more than empty moor.
"There," he said eventually, drawing rein at the crest of a low ridge, and I followed his outstretched hand to the shape rising out of the mist below us, smaller than I'd imagined, somehow, for everything it represented. A ruin. A single, broken silhouette against a sky the color of old iron, and even from this distance, even without th