The ash tasted like coins.
Kael lay inside the charred hollow until his shivers shook the bark loose around him. Every time his heart hit the inside of his ribs the faint red Lines in his left arm brightened, then dimmed, as if embarrassed to be seen. Down the slope, the imperial voices moved in a careful grid—short calls, two beats apart. Discipline. Breath held on the third beat to listen. He would learn their rhythm without meaning to.
He pressed the back of his hand against his lips to quiet his breathing. The Lines throbbed under the skin—thin, branching veins that had not been there an hour ago. They weren't scars. They felt like new roots grown through him.
"Report," a voice barked. Not close. But not far.
"Lower halls are purged. Resonance cannons spent. Orders?"
"Confirm the heir's death."
Silence, then the faint crunch of boots in snow. Kael curled smaller. The hollow stank of wet charcoal and sap boiled to tar. He thought about his mother's mouth forming the word run, then the forge's sound tearing through him like light. If he thought about anything else he would cry loud enough for the mountain to hear.
The snow hissed. Footsteps stopped above the hollow.
Kael held his breath. One heartbeat. Two. The Lines brightened, eager. Heat crowded his ribs.
The soldier above him exhaled, slow. "Nothing. Move."
When the crunching faded, Kael let his lungs go. Air poured in with a hurt he hadn't known air could have. He counted breaths the way his father had taught him when measuring metal cooling in the trough: in, hold, out, hold. Less noise that way. Less panic.
Only when the wind returned did he crawl out. He kept his belly against the ground, palms sunk in crusted snow, and slid like a lizard from one black stump to the next. The slope was a quilt of melted pockets and wind-whipped drifts. A raven watched from a broken post, head tilted, its feathers dusted with ash. It cawed once, quiet, as if embarrassed too.
He didn't go down toward the ruin. He went sideways, toward the firs pressed close along a ledge where the snow had drifted knee-high. The wind had scoured their branches clean. He burrowed into the drift until he was swallowed, then lay still, the world a dead blue light.
The cold bit hard.
At first it was just hurt, and he clenched up against it. Then something strange happened. The more the cold burned, the steadier his heartbeat felt. The Lines' glow stopped climbing and began to settle, like a kettle drawn off flame. His racing thoughts loosened their chokehold.
He stayed there until the tingle in his fingers became a slow thudding numbness. When he couldn't feel his toes he clawed his way out and lay gasping on top of the drift. Breath steamed. His arm's red dimmed to a faint ember.
Pain quiets the light, he thought, not knowing why the sentence felt true.
He stood. His legs shook but held. He was small, which helped: small things did not leave big footprints. He shuffled to a rock shelf and peered over the edge.
From that height, the stronghold looked like a mouth full of broken teeth. Black smoke made a low second sky. Bodies were ant-scattered along the walkways and carved stairs. The imperial searchers moved in squares, four and four and four, with one man in a white mantle directing from the edge of the crater—their breath rising in neat bursts. Banners lay half-buried, the gold catching light even through soot.
Kael scanned for his father. He saw a shape with a sword in its hand and hair like his father's, stiff with frost. The arm was wrong. The blade was wrong. He stared until the pain behind his eyes forced him to stop.
He turned away and walked into the trees.
—
He learned the mountain as if it had been a story he was supposed to read years ago and had refused. He learned which deadfall hollows stayed dry, which icicles tasted clean and which tasted of crushed pine, which wind meant storm and which meant knife-cold clear night. He learned to kick open snow crusts without breaking ankle lines. He learned that if he bit the inside of his cheek hard enough when the wind bullied tears from his eyes, the Lines under his skin seemed to swallow the heat, and the glow dulled.
On the second night he found a snare line recently set where rabbits had run. The loop was wrong—too high, too small—and Kael remembered watching a Virel scout teach boys how to tie a proper choke: three fingers wide, set at ankle height, anchored to a springy sapling. He set it again, this time right, and the simple act of doing something correct put weight on the inside of his bones that felt like mercy.
He slept not far, tucked into a lean-to of snapped boughs. The Lines in his arm kept him from freezing; they pushed warmth into muscle in small sips whenever he lost it. In sleep his hand kept finding his chest, as if checking that something under the sternum was still there. When he dreamed he heard his mother saying cover your ears and the sound that wasn't sound also warmly crawled through him.
A fox screamed at dawn, as foxes do—like a woman surprised in a church. Snow jittered off the lean-to roof. Kael sat up thinking he was back in the forge and almost cried when he saw the sticks and the rabbit snare. The snare held nothing. He reset it, slower, and waited. The Lines pulsed when he held very still; when he breathed shallow they dimmed. He filed that away the way his father had filed edges down: patient, uncompromising.
By noon the rabbit was there: a soft gray bundle twisting in panic, eyes glassy. Its front paws found no purchase. It thrashed until the sapling's flex exhausted it. When Kael crept close its body trembled against his palm like a heartbeat that did not belong to him. He had never killed anything that looked at him like that. He held it until it went slack. Then he apologized aloud because the grown-up part of him understood the rabbit did not understand and the child part of him believed words shaped weight.
He ate carefully—raw meat chewed until its salt was gone—and saved the rest in the snow. He scraped fur with a broken pine needle. He learned he could coax a thin line of heat along his fingers without making the whole arm blaze: the Lines responded to attention. If he focused on one thin branch under the skin, and pressed his teeth together, the red traveled there, and only there. His fingertips steamed over a sliver of ice until it melted enough to wash blood away. His head hurt afterward; the pain made the glow drop back again. He slept.
On the fourth day he heard men again. These did not march in squares. They moved like the trees moved—quiet, un-showy, cutting space not like conquerors but like brooms. Trackers.
Kael climbed onto a jut of granite and pressed his chest to the stone. He pushed his breath into the rock as if the stone could drink it. The Lines hummed against the cold, eager to be called; he clenched his teeth and let the cold bite. Pain steadied them. His hands stopped shaking.
Two men in gray cloaks stepped into view below his ledge. They weren't Oathbound—no gold, no choir belts, no ritual cords—but imperial, still. Their boots were wrapped in cloth to hide the pattern. One knelt to study the snow.
"Child prints," he said. Calm. "Weight light. No drag. No blood now. He is learning."
"Orders are witness removal," the other said. His voice was bored, the way a man sounded when he disliked the taste of the work but ate it anyway because the money kept his wife warm. He looked up into the branches and did not look at the stone shelf where Kael lay because the stone was not suspicious like branches were.
Kael's chest hurt from not breathing. He tasted copper. His heart tapped inside his ear like a cautious messenger. The red under his skin wanted to flare.
You cannot change the world with a thought, he told himself in a child's language. But you can change what your ribs do.
He counted out his breaths, each one a command. In. Hold. Out. Hold. If he did nothing else for the next ten minutes, he would do this. He focused on the stretch of skin between his thumb and forefinger. If the light goes there, it will be small. The Lines obeyed like a dim rope light, warming the small web of flesh until snow there melted tick by tick. Pain from cold and pain from hunger and pain from fear braided into something that did not own him.
The kneeling man stood. "He passed last night," he said. "He is above us now."
"How do you know."
"Because there are no prints here, and the cold makes children hide up, not down. They do not trust open ground. They trust branches."
The bored one grunted. He turned and looked directly toward the rock. Not at Kael—at a blue jay perched on a twig a handspan over Kael's nose. The bird's nipple-bright eye blinked. Bored Tracker lifted a hand to shoo it. The jay flitted away. He did not notice the brown-black hairline crack in the snow-lip above them.
Kael did. He saw it like he saw the Lines—thin and insistent. The break had been hidden by a skin of crust. The hunt and wind and ice had prepped it for the gentlest excuse to fall. Even a blue jay's feet. Even a child's breath—if that breath were pointed properly. He slid his hand along the lip until it found a section of snow that hung unsupported over open air. He put his mouth to the ice and exhaled slow and steady.
The warmth crawled through the snow, slunk its way along the crack. The first fragment dropped silently. The next slid and plopped, audible. Both men looked up.
The snow-slab let go.
It did not bury them—this was not a story that kind—but it knocked both men down the slope in a powder rush that stole their feet and dignity. The bored one hit a stump and did not get up. The other rolled, cursed, dug his blade in and stopped his fall. He lay coughing. When he pushed up onto his elbow he coughed again and spat blood.
He scanned the shelf and saw the edges of Kael's fingers peeking white where snow had stuck to skin. His eyes sharpened, not cruel, not kind. Professional. He started to rise.
Kael threw the only thing he had. A rabbit limb. It bounced uselessly off the man's shoulder. The man almost laughed.
"Boy," he said, surprised by his own voice. "Don't—"
A shadow passed over him: the raven again, dropping out of nowhere. It struck the man's eyes as if stealing something that had been promised. The man flinched, blade slipped, boot slid. He tumbled, cursed into a hard stop against a root.
The raven landed on the stump, head cocked, as if waiting for cloth to ask a question it could answer. Kael did not wait. He slithered back from the ledge and ran bent double through the trees until the air tore at his throat. He ran until he saw ice blistered up from a stream and, because running had been a thought and thoughts get tired, he stopped and put his hands into the water.
The pain was so clean it made the world simple again. When it had eaten enough of him to matter, he pulled his hands out and shook them and laughed once, a hiccup that hurt. The Lines glowed quiet and sleek. He could hide again.
He did not feel brave. He felt like something smaller than a rabbit, narrower than a bird's shadow. But he had moved a piece of the world without screaming. That was new.
He followed the stream uphill until it surrendered to a shallow cave no bigger than a hay cart. The stone floor was dry. A wind-hole near the back made a quiet tone, a breath-thin whistle that rose and fell with the gusts. Kael sat in it and listened. If he closed his eyes the pitch almost matched the memory of his father's hammer striking steel.
He put his palm on his chest. The small warmth there answered his touch like a sleeping dog thumping once to say I hear you.
He said, aloud this time because nobody was here to chance dying for hearing him: "I will remember."
He meant: I will remember how they breathe. I will remember where snow cracks. I will remember what cold does to light. I will remember that pain is not only fear, it is a lever, and I will learn the hand that uses it.
He practiced making the Lines crawl to his fingertips and then to his wrist and then to just under his collarbone where his heart lived. Each time he moved them he paid for it with a headache or a shiver or a quiver he could not command to stop. He practiced not crying when that happened. He practiced sleeping when the wind-hole sang the wrong note because wrong notes meant storm, and a storm meant sound to cover a child's noise.
At dusk the raven came to the cave mouth and hopped in with the insolence of a thing that does not ask permission. It pecked at the rabbit leftovers, then at Kael's boot laces, then at a patch of snow that had drifted in. Kael did not shoo it. He watched it tilt its head, black eye bright. The bird looked at the Lines under his skin and did not startle. It only puffed feathers once and settled as if to say, Yes, that is the right color for a night this cold.
He slept with the bird a few feet away and woke in dark to find frost silvering the cave mouth. His breath plumed slow. He counted it anyway.
On the fifth day, hunger became a new kind of pain—hollow and dizzy instead of sharp. He discovered another rule: when he was empty the Lines warmed faster, almost greedy. He learned to ration that warmth—no glow in open, no glow when wind fell, glow only under wrapped cloth or under hands. He punished himself when he forgot. He rewarded himself with a hum when he did well, the noise ridiculous and brave.
On the sixth night, he heard the chorus.
It started as a low thrumming he thought was wind stacked on wind, then lifted into a broad, even pulse that seemed to push through the stone under him, up his spine, through his teeth. It wasn't the forge. It was bigger. Older. The mountain's own breath, slow and patient.
He crawled to the wind-hole and pressed his face to the stone rim. The sound filled his head until there was no room for thoughts that wanted to break him. His Lines answered before he could. They rose like red coal blown on, then steadied to the mountain's count.
He realized, suddenly, with that child clarity that arrives like a new word: the mountain had always been singing. His clan had carved their halls where the song was strongest. The Empire had burned the surface, but the song remained.
He did not feel safe, but he felt tethered. A thread from him to something that did not care whether he lived—that was important—yet would be there if he did.
He slept.
Snow crawled over the cave mouth, making a thin blue light. In the morning Kael woke to find a print at the rim—human, small. Not a soldier. The toe-splay wrong for a boot. Barefoot, then. Or wrapped in rags.
He waited a long while before crawling to the entrance. The raven had gone. The print led away along the stream. The heel had slid; whoever made it was weak, or tired, or both. Kael weighed risk and hunger and the ache of being alone while being hunted. In the end it was not loneliness that moved him. It was curiosity, which is how children say hope before they learn the price.
He followed.
The track led to a cluster of boulders and a dead tree big enough for three boys to hide in if they did not mind splinters. Kael crept forward, palm open, showing he held nothing.
"Hello," he whispered into the hollow.
A shape flinched. A face turned. A girl a little older than him, hair matted, lips cracked. She stared at the Lines in his arm and did not blink until the wind forced her to. She lifted one finger to her mouth for quiet and then pointed down-slope with a small, decisive movement. Her eyes were gray like old stone. Kael looked where she pointed.
Two trackers moved through the trees, patient as before.
The girl slid a strip of cloth from her wrist and wrapped it around Kael's glowing hand without asking permission. The rough weave bit his skin. The light dulled.
She pointed to herself, then made a sign with two fingers crossing like blades and a circle drawn on the air. He did not know the sign. She made it again, slower. Two blades, one circle—Nocturne States. He had seen a Nocturne merchant once, years ago, knife-juggler, breathing coins off a table. The girl's hands, despite their cracks, moved with the same economic grace.
She leaned in, very close, and put her lips near his ear so the air would not carry—not sound, only warmth.
"Breathe like this," she said, and showed him: four-count in, four-count hold, six-count out, two-count hold. "Quiet lung. Quiet snow."
He copied. The world tightened then widened. The Lines obeyed the count like a song they preferred.
She nodded once.
Then, together, small and breathing like stones, they did not run. They moved.
Behind them, the mountain sang. Ahead, the forest made its own choir: raven clicks, branch-cry, snow hiss, the wet pocket cough of a tracker who had swallowed wrong rising and being swallowed by wind. Kael counted the beat and held to it, and when his fear tried to climb up into his throat, he gave it something to count besides reasons to die.
He did not know that the woman who would one day betray him had already turned her face toward this valley. He did not know that a general with a borrowed smile had looked into a polar mirror and measured the small delay where a boy should have been dead.
He knew only this: if he could make his lungs quiet, the light would behave. If the light behaved, he could live the next minute. If he lived the next minute, he could remember.
He remembered. And the mountain, indifferent and generous, kept breathing.