Read a preview
Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Coin, Not Causes
The wind across the Winterglass Expanse could flay a man’s soul if he let it.
Kaelrin Thorne never let it.
He rode at the rear of the merchant caravan, cloak snapping like a war banner, eyes narrowed against the glare. Twenty wagons, forty guards, one fat purse at the far end in High Hollow. That was the contract. Nothing more.
“Storm’s turning ugly,” grumbled old Fenrik, the caravan master, reining his pony beside Kaelrin’s black gelding. “We’ll lose a day if we push on.”
“We lose two if we camp early,” Kaelrin replied, voice flat. “Your coin, your choice. I’m just the steel you rented.”
Fenrik spat into the snow. “Cold bastard.”
“Warm ones don’t last long out here.”
They pressed on.
By dusk the sky had gone the color of old bruises. The wind rose to a scream, driving needles of ice that found every seam in mail and leather. The caravan halted in the lee of a wind-scoured ridge, drivers swearing as they fought to anchor the wagons.
Kaelrin dismounted, boots crunching. He checked the picket line, counted heads, then walked the perimeter alone. Habit. You didn’t survive fifteen years selling your sword by trusting other men to watch the dark.
That was when he heard it.
A thread of sound beneath the howl—high, clear, almost human. Singing.
He told himself it was the wind playing tricks. The Expanse was full of ghost noises. Still, his hand found the hilt of his longsword.
The song came again, closer, from the ridgeline above.
Kaelrin climbed.
The ridge dropped away into a chasm newly split by the storm, a black scar thirty feet across. Ice groaned deep below. And there, wedged halfway down the wall, a pale shape glowed like moonlight trapped under skin.
A woman.
Frozen to the waist, arms flung out as if she’d tried to fly, hair the color of fresh powder streaming upward in the updraft. She was singing—or trying to—lips blue, voice cracking into the wind.
Kaelrin stared a moment longer than any sane man would.
Then he uncoiled the rope from his belt, knotted it to an iron piton, and went over the edge.
