The trail east had thinned to little more than a game track by midday, the last of Tavik’s own contract markers well behind her and nothing yet ahead to replace them. She’d made good time despite the pace, faster than the guide’s eastward trip had taken with two people instead of one, and she’d allowed herself exactly one thought about how much of that speed came from wanting to close the distance to Vhar before anything on that ridge decided the four days were up early.
TAK! TAK! TAK!
The rider’s horse shifted at the trail fork a full day before Nyra expected to see anyone who wasn’t already part of Tavik’s band. She recognized the travel coat before she recognized the face beneath it.
"House Severin’s courier," she said, not slowing her pace. "You’re a long way past any road your last letter was delivered on."
"The House sent me to escort you back to sanctioned ground." He fell into step beside the trail rather than blocking it outright, one hand resting loose near his belt rather than reaching for anything on it. "This far east, beyond any contract line, beyond any Academy authorization, is exactly the kind of exposure the House’s letter warned you about."
"I read the letter. I understood the terms the same day I received them." Nyra kept walking. "Nothing in those terms said I couldn’t cross a boundary. Only that I’d answer for it alone if I did."
He pointed west. "Return to ground where Severin guards can reach you. You are two days beyond the last contract marker."
"You withdrew backing from this ground." She stopped and faced him. "Say whether you came to escort me or force me home."
He shifted his weight before he answered, the particular discomfort of a man delivering a message he didn’t fully agree with. "I’m to bring you back. With or without your cooperation, if it comes to that."
"With, then. Because without isn’t a version of today that ends well for either of us." Nyra didn’t reach for Thronebreak, though her weight shifted enough that he’d have noticed it if he was paying real attention.
He reached for her arm anyway, the reflexive motion of a man trying to physically punctuate an order his words hadn’t managed to land. Nyra caught his wrist before his fingers closed, redirected it past her rather than breaking it, and stepped through the space his overcommitted reach had opened.
SKID!
His boot scraped across loose grit as she put him past her shoulder instead of in front of it.
"Don’t," she said, releasing him the moment the point had been made. "Not because I’d hurt you badly for trying. Because the report you’d have to write afterward would be a great deal more embarrassing than the one you’re already dreading."
He straightened, color rising in his face, and didn’t reach for her again. Whatever authority he’d been sent with clearly hadn’t included a contingency for a target who could turn a grab into a lesson without breaking stride, and he seemed to understand, belatedly, that the House had sent him to enforce a decision it had never actually equipped him to enforce.
"I have a report that changes how the Wildblood Desolation reclassifies its own contracted boundary, and a partner two days east who’s mapping a Tier IV predator’s territory alone because I chose to be somewhere else. Neither of those things gets less urgent because House Severin wants me somewhere it can watch me do nothing."
"That’s not my decision to make."
"No. But it’s mine, and I’ve already made it." Nyra studied him for a moment, the particular exhaustion of a man sent to enforce a policy he clearly hadn’t been given the tools to enforce. "How long have you been riding to catch me?"
"Since yesterday morning. Your guide’s report reached the House faster than either of you expected it to, and I was given no time to rest before they put me back on the road east."
"And nobody thought to send someone who could force me to obey an order they knew I might refuse?"
"I was told escort would be sufficient." He didn’t quite meet her eyes saying it, focusing instead on the middle distance past her shoulder.
She held his gaze without raising her voice further, letting the stillness of it carry more weight than volume would have. "You can report that I refused an escort I was never obligated to accept. You can report that I threatened you, if that story serves the House better than the truth does. Or you can report exactly what actually happened here, which is that a Severin made a choice with her eyes open and kept walking."
He looked past her, east, toward ground that visibly unsettled him more than her refusal did. Whatever briefing he’d received clearly hadn’t accounted for a Tier IV predator being the actual reason for her absence, and the shift in his expression told her the moment that fact finally registered as real rather than reported secondhand.
"There’s something out there that size?"
"A Tier IV animal broke a boy’s shoulder and killed livestock at two camps." Nyra looked east. "Vhar is tracking it alone. I am not walking west while he is on that ridge." Her voice lowered. "Write that in your report."
The courier said nothing for a long moment, weighing a report he’d clearly expected to be simple against one that had just become considerably harder to deliver cleanly. He glanced east once, toward ground he had no orders covering and clearly no desire to cross regardless. "I can’t make you return."
"No. You can’t."
"I can tell them you refused, and why." He stepped back from the trail’s center, the retreat of a man who’d never actually been authorized to force the issue and had known it from the start. "That’s the whole of what I can actually do here."
"Do that. It’s more honest than most of what gets written about people like me." Nyra started walking again before he’d finished stepping fully clear, not because she doubted he’d let her pass, but because there was nothing left in the conversation worth the time it would cost to linger over it.
He didn’t follow.
TAK-TAK! TAK-TAK!
His horse turned west a few minutes later. The hooves receded at a pace that said he had no hurry to deliver news he already knew would not land well.
Nyra left the fork without watching him go or listening for him. The east track climbed over bare shelves where the wind had carried every soft footprint away. At a narrow wash she stopped long enough to refill one waterskin.
SPLASH!
Cold water struck the leather mouth and ran over her knuckles. She drank half, rubbed dirt over the bright Severin wax showing through her coat, then checked the copied valley map against the ridge shapes ahead.
The split crown from the courier’s dirt sketch stood north of her by late afternoon. One ravine below it had been choked with pale rubble. Even from the track she could see drill scars cut into the exposed face and a black streak where water had once run cleanly through the stone. She did not descend to inspect it. Vhar waited east, and the valley needed daylight, a report, and more hands than she carried.
At dusk, she made a small fire inside a rock hollow and set two stones on either side of it so the flame could not be seen from the lower trail.
TIK! TIK!
The flame caught the dry twig ends and tapped against the hollow’s stone. She ate hard bread, cleaned the dust out of Thronebreak’s socket, and rewrapped the blister that had opened beneath her heel. The work took minutes. Sleeping took longer.
She wrote the valley’s coordinates beneath the map before the light died, then sealed the page in oilcloth against rain and sweat.
The ink dried before she folded it away for good that night.
Before dawn, she was on the track again. No House rider stood behind her. No new message waited at the fork. Her heel hurt with every downhill step, which meant she adjusted her weight instead of slowing down. The map stayed dry inside her coat. By midmorning, Riona’s ridge had risen clear beyond the scrub.
For the next hour, the trail climbed through scrub and broken rock. Afternoon light pushed Nyra toward a shelter before dark.
CRUNCH!
One boot heel broke loose stone. She shifted her stride before the crack traveled into the blister beneath it. She replayed the courier’s words and found nothing she wanted to take back. Severin had sent a man who could request her return but could not force it. That was enough.
The courier had seen Nyra refuse a return order after he heard about the animal, Dessin’s shoulder, and the dead livestock. He could write that report honestly or lie. Either way, she kept walking east.
She thought of Vhar somewhere ahead, mapping a ridge with an arm that hadn’t fully healed, trusting her to close the distance before whatever displaced predator he was tracking decided the interval between attacks was due to shorten again. Two more days of walking stood between her and that trust being answered. She intended to spend every one of them making the distance shorter rather than easier.
Nyra kept walking east, the valley’s location folded carefully into her coat alongside a written account that would matter more to the Wildblood Desolation than to any House reader waiting to file it.
Refusing an escort had cost her nothing she wasn’t already prepared to pay. Getting back to Vhar before the ridge asked something of him that he couldn’t answer alone was the only cost left on today’s ledger that actually worried her.