Riona sent a healer to Vhar before he finished describing the ridge. The healer found no wound. His body had spent hard. She left him by the fire with a bowl and an order to eat.
The camp had settled into the particular quiet that came after a danger had been confirmed rather than merely suspected. Riona’s people worked the pen wall by lamplight now, unwilling to leave the breach open even one more night, and the boy Dessin sat close enough to the fire to watch the work without being able to help it, his bound arm resting against his chest.
TOK! TOK!
Mallets drove fresh pegs through the replacement timbers.
Nyra waited until the healer left before she said what she’d been carrying since the shelf.
"I need to go back."
Vhar didn’t ask back where. He’d heard enough in her voice on the ridge to already know. "To the quarry crew’s man."
"Bring me the courier and the duplicate ledger. The quarry crew disturbed more ground than anyone else here. I want to know where they blasted before we walk into a den blind."
"You could send word instead. Let Tavik question him again."
"Tavik cannot question him about the ledger’s marks." She spoke without heat. "I read the ledger and know which shipments and cuts to ask about. Sending questions through Tavik costs two more days."
Vhar studied her for a long moment. "House Severin already told you what this costs."
"The letter named the price." Nyra met his eyes. "It withdrew guards, money, and witnesses. It did not forbid me from acting."
"That’s not nothing."
"No. It isn’t." She let that sit a moment before continuing. "But a wounded animal that’s already proven it thinks before it fights is heading toward something none of us understand yet, and the fastest way to understand it doesn’t run through this camp. It runs through a man Tavik’s people are already holding two days from here."
"Two days there. Two days back. That’s four days you’re not here if something changes on this end."
"Riona’s camp must hold for four days." Nyra’s mouth twisted. "You handled the ridge with my spear beside you. Riona’s people know these pens better than we do."
Vhar didn’t argue that point, because it was true, and pretending otherwise would have cost them both something neither could afford right now. "Who’s your guide?"
"Riona offered one of her own, someone who knows the fast route rather than the safe one." Nyra checked Thronebreak’s strap out of habit rather than need. "He doesn’t fight. That’s not what I need him for."
"You’re going in without backup into ground that already has one confirmed threat moving through it, to ask questions of a man who has every reason to lie to you."
"Yes." She said it plainly, no defense offered because none had been asked for. "That’s the whole of it, and I’m still going."
He didn’t try to talk her out of it a second time. Six days ago he might have, back when neither of them had fully learned what the other one was actually capable of carrying alone. He knew better now. The argument had already ended before either of them raised their voice over it.
"You could still wait for the letter House Severin already sent," he said, not because he expected it to change anything, but because saying nothing at all would have felt like agreeing too easily with a risk that deserved at least one honest objection first. "Read it. Know exactly what the terms are before you break them further."
"I know exactly what the terms are. I memorized them the night they arrived." Nyra’s voice didn’t rise, but something in it sharpened all the same. "Reading the letter again doesn’t change a single word of it. It only gives me one more excuse to sit here deciding instead of going and doing the thing the terms already told me I’d be answering for regardless."
"That’s not what I meant."
"I heard you." She exhaled. "House Severin has spent my whole life deciding where my name belongs. I chose this work. Rereading a letter will not change that."
Vhar didn’t answer that immediately. There wasn’t a version of agreement that wouldn’t have sounded like managing her, and there wasn’t a version of disagreement that would have been honest.
"You go with everything you can carry that isn’t a person," he said. "Water for longer than you think you’ll need it. And you send word the moment you’re back inside contract ground, whether or not you have an answer yet."
"I will." Nyra shouldered her pack, checked its weight once against her shoulder, and looked back at him before she turned toward the waiting guide. "You’ll be careful with that ridge. It already knows what your fists can do to its shoulder. It won’t offer that joint again."
"I noticed."
"Notice it again when it matters, not after."
"I generally try to notice things before they matter," Vhar said. "It’s a policy I recommend."
Something almost like a laugh crossed her face, gone as quickly as it arrived, replaced by the particular seriousness of someone about to walk two days into ground she’d never covered before, toward a man who owed her nothing but a lie if he could manage one. She checked the guide’s own pack once, a habit that had nothing to do with distrust and everything to do with the years she’d spent making sure nobody else’s carelessness became her own emergency later.
"House Severin can send another letter when I return. I would rather answer for this choice than lose the chance to make it."
"That’s not a bad way to live."
"It’s the only way I’ve found that doesn’t leave someone else paying for my caution." She adjusted the pack once more, nodded to the waiting guide, and started down the trail Riona’s people used for the fastest route back to Tavik’s camp, not looking back a second time.
Vhar watched until the trail bent past the tree line and took her out of sight, then turned back toward the camp, toward Riona’s people still repairing a pen wall that would need to hold against something that had already proven a reinforced one wasn’t enough.
"You’re not going back up there without her," Riona said, settling onto the log across from him without being asked, her own wrapped forearm resting against her knee. It wasn’t a question either.
"I stay off the ridge tonight. I need food, Uvar, and more than one injured shoulder to plan the next climb." Vhar rolled his shoulder. "Four days gives me time to map the lower ground."
"Properly, meaning what?"
"Meaning I walk the lower approaches to that ridge without climbing it again, mapping every route down that something with that build could actually use, so the next time it comes looking for us, it doesn’t get to choose the ground twice in a row." He looked toward the dark line of the ridge, invisible now against the deeper dark of the sky behind it. "And meaning your people stop losing anyone else to a wall that already proved it isn’t enough."
Riona considered that, then nodded once, the same gesture she’d used the day they arrived, trust extended one careful measure at a time rather than all at once. "We’ll work while you map. Four days is enough time to raise that wall properly, if you don’t mind hands that aren’t as steady as they were a week ago."
She glanced toward Dessin, still watching the pen repair from his place near the fire, his good hand flexing uselessly against his knee as if it could help from that distance if it only tried hard enough. "He’ll want to be one of those hands, and I won’t stop him from asking. I’ll stop him from lifting anything heavier than a lamp."
"Unsteady hands still get the wall built. Hands that stop trying don’t." Vhar settled back toward the fire’s warmth, the ridge still visible in his mind even with his eyes on the flames. Whatever waited past that ridge would still be there when the four days ended, whether it was still alone in whatever it was protecting or not.
Before the camp slept, Vhar walked the pen’s outside edge with Riona and a charcoal stub. He marked the low wash, the ridge-facing breach, the narrow gap between the long shelter and the animal pens, and the only uphill path wide enough for a handcart. Riona watched each mark take shape on a scrap of board.
"If it comes through the north wall again, nobody gathers here," he said, tapping the space beside the pen. "They go behind the shelter. The carts block this gap. Two people take the children uphill."
"And the herd?" Riona asked.
"Open the south gate. Let them run away from the ridge. A broken pen can be rebuilt. People cannot."
Dessin had crept close enough to listen. He held the lamp with his good hand and watched Vhar draw the last mark. "I can open the south gate."
Riona looked at his bound arm, then at the gate. "You can tell the person at the gate when to open it. That is work too."
The boy nodded once, taking the lamp back toward the shelter when she sent him.
Riona copied the marks onto a second board for the night watch.
Riona was already back at the wall by the time he looked up, checking a lashing Dessin had tied wrong, patient about it in a way that cost her nothing to give twice.