Chapter 45 | Part 2 | The Factions

They got through the hunter position at night.

Aldric did not describe the details afterward because the details were the kind that soldiers store and civilians do not need. Two of the fourteen arrows were spent. One hunter would not report back. The others scattered into the dark when they realized the group was moving through, not around, and the cold sword in Aldric’s hand turned out to be enough because steel does not require resonance to cut and Aldric had been cutting things with steel since before anyone thought to add magic to a blade.

By dawn they had cleared the southern corridor and reached the ridge where the terrain opened up and the view south showed them what was coming.

“Three armies,” Balin said.

He had scouted ahead while the others rested in a depression between two ice formations, the brief hours of recovery that Aldric had allowed because Maris needed them and because pushing a damaged seer beyond her limits would cost more than the time spent waiting. Balin had gone south with his split staff and his steady legs and come back with a report that he delivered the way priests deliver bad news, which is to say calmly, with the understanding that calm does not help but the absence of calm helps less.

“Elenoria’s scouts from the west. Light formations, moving fast, the kind of units they send when they want to understand a situation before committing. They’re a week out, maybe less. They’ll be carrying diplomatic instruments alongside weapons, because Elenoria’s first response to anything is to try to understand it and their second response is to try to control it.”

“And the others?”

“Frostgard war-bands from the north. Three columns that I could see from the ridge. Moving south toward us, or toward the barrier, or toward whatever they think caused the sky to change. They’re not scouting. They’re mobilizing. Full military response. Supplies for a sustained campaign. The Frostgard clans haven’t moved like this since the border wars.”

Aldric processed that. Frostgard war-bands meant territorial response, the reflex of a people who lived in a harsh landscape and who responded to any change in that landscape by putting warriors between themselves and the change. They would not know what the breach meant. They would know that the sky was wrong and that wrongness came from the north and that the correct response to wrongness from the north was to march north with weapons and ask questions from a position of strength.

“And the Grukmar,” Balin said. His voice changed on this one. The calm stayed, but something beneath it shifted.

“How many?”

“All of them.”

Aldric looked at the priest. Balin looked back with the steadiness of a man who had said what he meant and meant what he said.

“The Grukmar are not raiding,” Balin continued. “They’re marching. Organized columns. Not the clan-scale movements we’ve seen at the border, the seasonal raids, the territory disputes. This is tribal-scale mobilization. Multiple clans moving in coordination, which means someone has united them, which means someone has given them a reason to move together instead of against each other.”

“The breach,” Xandor said. He had been listening from the depression where he sat with his journal, his pen moving even as he processed the information, the scholar’s reflex to document as a form of understanding. “The breach changes the power landscape. The barrier’s compromise means the Drow guardianship is broken. The system that maintained balance, that kept certain forces contained, that prevented certain kinds of expansion, that system is damaged. The Grukmar understand power vacuums. They may not understand the barrier’s mechanics, but they understand that something that held them back is no longer holding them back.”

“And the dragons?” Dulint asked.

The question sat in the cold air. No one answered immediately because no one had a comfortable answer and because the question itself carried the weight of everything Nyxara had been and everything Nyxara’s absence now meant.

“Dragon Conquest,” Maris said. She was sitting against the ice formation, her eyes open, the bleached irises catching the amber-rust light. She looked less fragile than she had three days ago and more dangerous, the difference between a wound that is healing and a wound that is adapting.

“Nyxara’s goal. The barrier’s weakness makes it viable. Not just for her. For all of them. Whatever the dragons have been planning for centuries, the breach is the condition that makes those plans executable.”

“You can see them?” Aldric asked.

“I can feel the scale of what’s moving. The connection is raw and I can’t direct it, but I can feel the weight of it. There are things in motion that are larger than armies. Older than nations. The barrier held back more than an entity. It held back every plan that depended on the barrier being weak.”

Aldric counted his twelve remaining arrows. He looked south at the terrain they needed to cross. Frostgard war-bands from the north, closing behind them. Elenoria scouts from the west, a week away. Grukmar marching from the east. And above all of it, implied but not visible, the dragons, operating at a scale that made human armies look like border patrols.

“We’re between them,” he said. “All of them. Five people in winter furs with a dead stone and a split staff and twelve arrows and the only eyewitness account of what happened at the barrier.”

“The account has value,” Xandor said.

“The account makes us a target. Every faction that wants to understand the breach will want us. For our testimony. For the Beacon. For Maris. We’re not travelers anymore. We’re assets. And assets get collected.”

The amber-rust sky stretched above them, the permanent condition that every army and faction and force was now responding to. The sky that proved something had changed. The sky that did not explain what.

“We need to reach a settlement before any of them reach us,” Dulint said. “Get the account into official channels. Once it’s documented and distributed, we stop being the only source. We stop being worth hunting.”

“The nearest settlement is four days south,” Balin said. “Assuming the terrain hasn’t changed, which I’m not assuming.”

Aldric sheathed his sword. Checked his quiver. Twelve arrows and the cold blade and the knowledge that the world was mobilizing around them and that being small in a system this large was either protection or vulnerability and he could not tell which.

“Four days,” he said. “We move.”

End of Chapter 45.2 —> 45.3: The Things That Follow: The War