By noon the coast was a memory of salt on his tongue and a smear of iron on the horizon. The land opened into a wide, wind-bent plain where grass ran in long, tawny waves—and between the waves, scars of something older and hotter than winter. Patches of earth had been melted flat into panes of black glass. Some were the size of a shield, some the size of a house, some fused together into crooked mirrors that caught the sky and broke it.
Jalen walked the seams where dirt met glass. His boots slid if he stepped wrong; every gust carried a hiss like sand across a blade. When clouds dragged their bellies low, the panes turned to dark water, reflecting stormlight. When the sun broke out, each sheet flashed and vanished and flashed again, as if the land were blinking.
He stopped at the first big field of glass and looked down. His reflection stared back—blood long scrubbed from his face, hair bound tight, a gold-violet pulse still faint beneath the skin. Behind him, the reflection of the sky lagged half a heartbeat. When he lifted a hand, the hand in the glass rose a moment later, pulling time like a snagged thread. He didn't like it. He moved on.
The wind here never settled. It came in steady shoulders, pushing the grass in one direction, then another, so the steppe moved like muscle under skin. Once, he heard a far, low thunder that wasn't weather—herds rolling somewhere beyond the heat-shivered line of the world. He pictured them: big-shouldered, horned, moving as one dark river, the ground lightening and darkening under their hooves.
He ate standing: dried fish, a heel of hard bread. He drank carefully. The west smelled of iron and sun-baked sap, not salt. Even that felt like a betrayal and a relief in the same breath.
Near midafternoon he found a ruin—not a village, nothing that kind—but the spine of a road older than Everlock's crown. Square-cut stones rose out of the grass like teeth. A cracked marker lay half-buried beside it, letters eaten by weather. Something had once been named here. The steppe had taken the name back.
He climbed a low rise and saw the land ripple out in layers: near, grass and glass; farther, a line where the plain dipped into a shallow basin; beyond that, dark humps of barrow-mounds, pricked with cairns like spilled stars. Between them all, the black panes stitched a crooked seam—evidence of a burn that must have run for miles, hot enough to turn soil to mirror. The imbalance after Freedom's death had not been a rumor here; it had been a hand.
By late light, he passed two animals at the edge of a glass tongue: antelope-thin, long-legged, with antlers that branched too many times and then not at all, stopping as if mid-thought. They watched him without moving, their reflections slower than their bodies. When he took one more step, both sprang, their hooves striking sparks on the glass, and were gone—only the second set of them in the mirror finishing the leap after the first had already vanished.
He kept his sword close but unlit. Since the night the vault shattered, power sat under his skin like a coiled wire, ready. He could shape a blade with a breath. He didn't. Not unless he had to. A god who burned at every touch left nothing but ash behind.
Near dusk he came to the basin he'd seen from the rise. Its bottom was a shallow pan of fused earth—one broad, flawless sheet of glass, wind-polished and clean as a night lake. At its center, a single obelisk thrust up from the mirror, sunk at a tilt, veined with metal. When the sun slid to the rim of the world, the obelisk lit in a narrow band and threw a spear of light across the plate, cutting Jalen into two men—one standing, one just a fraction late and off to the side.
He circled the edge and made camp on dirt, not mirror: a small fire cupped close with stones, a tied sail of canvas to break the wind. He set traps for nothing—the steppe did not come close when flame showed—but old habits demanded he try. The first stars came out while the sky was still bruised, cueing their reflections in the glass below. For a while, it was hard to tell which world was real: the one above his face or the one beneath his feet.
He ate the last of the bread. The wind tugged his cloak and worried the edge of the canvas like teeth. Far away, thunder-herds muttered to themselves in low rolls. Closer, something small clicked along the rim of the basin and then stopped. He didn't turn. Nothing was hunting him. Not yet.
He took out the fox carving without meaning to. The small, crude shape sat in his palm as if taking the measure of the place. When he set it beside the fire, its shadow fell across two panes at once, split clean down the middle.
"Not where you would've chosen," he said to no one, and to Rhea. "But west is open."
He slept in shifts. In the first hours, the glass held the sky perfectly. In the second, thin veils of light—faint auroras—moved low across the plain, green and blue and a barely-there violet that made the hairs on his arms rise. The panes took those colors and made lanes of them, like paths through water. He dreamed of the Old Man's tree cracking and the fruit that bore his name leaking light; he woke with his hand curled around the hilt he hadn't drawn.
Close to morning, the wind died all at once. A herd rolled the rim of the world—shapes like islands moving over sea—and their breath plumed in the cold. One broke away and stood a long time at the edge of the basin, a dark mass with a white blaze down the nose. It looked at Jalen, or at the reflection of him, as if weighing which was truer. When it moved on, he felt lighter without knowing why.
He broke camp in five minutes. The fire left a dull smear on the stone. He scuffed it out until only a handprint of ash remained, then brushed even that away. You didn't leave edges of yourself where you didn't mean to be found.
By noon, heat lay like a clear weight across the steppe. The glass sang in a thin, high voice as the sun climbed, and mirages walked the horizon—towers where there were none, a thin line of water that slipped away when he got close. He rationed water like a miser counts coins. Salt kissed his lips anyway.
Toward late day, he found the first sign of men: a cairn raised with purpose, not weather. At its base, under a flat stone, a wrapped cache—jerked meat, a twist of dried berries, a clay stoppered vial that smelled like cedar when he cracked it. Hunters' gifts at a fork that did not exist on any map but their own. Mira had known. He ate standing, and put the vial back, and left a coil of line in its place. Take only what you must.
As the light thinned, black clouds massed in the west—thin but fast, like a flock. He braced for rain. None came. Instead, the sky opened in a silent flash that left spiderwebs of afterimage across his vision and lit the panes in a grid. For a heartbeat the steppe looked caged, every strip of glass a bar. Then the light died and the wind returned and the world loosened again.
He made his second camp in the lee of a low, buckled ridge where the glass had shattered into plates and pebbles. The shards chimed when the wind ran through them. He ate better this time: meat from the cache and water warming in his mouth before he swallowed. He thought of Mira's steady eyes and John's damp palm against his cheek. He thought of the pulse under his own skin, gold with a seam of violent violet, and of a crown that burned in reflections.
He put his hand on the ground. The earth here was warm a finger's depth down, as if it remembered the heat that had made it into mirror. He whispered a name into it—the one on a stone far behind him—and felt the way sound died in glass and kept going in dirt. He preferred the dirt.
Sleep came and went in small, hard coins. In one of them, he stood in a field of panes with the sky running backward above him, the herd's thunder fading into the future instead of the past. In another, he walked on a road of mirrors and the man in the glass lagged farther and farther behind until he realized he was no longer reflected at all.
He woke before dawn and stood on the ridge to watch the world find its color. The east reddened the plates at his feet, then burned them gold, then white. The grass took the light in long bands, and the herds looked like moving scabs on the far skin of the earth. For the first time since he'd stepped away from Hearthgrave, he felt the size of the west as something that could hold him without swallowing him.
He shouldered his pack. He palmed the fox and slid it back in deep. He touched the cord in his pocket, and the promise hammered into bone at the grave. Then he went down off the ridge and followed the crooked seam where glass stitched land to land, westward, where Everlock's shadow thinned and something else—older, not kinder—waited with its mouth closed, listening.