The mist did not lift so much as thin, and through that thinning the ridge showed itself: a dark spine of pines, wet stone underfoot, and far along the line of the mountains the broken teeth of a castle that had not been whole in anyone's living memory. Grey sky pressed low. Somewhere below the pines a stream argued with rocks it had already worn smooth. The air smelled of resin, cold iron, and the faint sweet rot of last autumn's needles.
Serenya stood at the edge of the overlook with her wooden longbow already half drawn. The yellow fletching of the arrow caught what little light there was and held it, as if the feathers had brought their own small sun from a kinder climate. Her thick dark-brown braid lay over her left shoulder, damp at the ends. The dark green hood of her cloak had fallen back. Under the cloak she wore a brown tunic cinched by a leather chest strap that had seen more seasons than her face suggested; she was still in her twenties, pale as river ice, and her eyes—
Her eyes were wrong.
They glowed an unnerving supernatural light blue, blank and entranced, as if someone had poured cold fire into the sockets and told the person behind them to keep quiet. She did not blink often. When she did, the glow stuttered and returned, stubborn as a brand.
Behind her, two armored men waited on horseback among the pines. The second, younger, kept his mount reined hard and his mouth shut. The first swung down before Serenya heard the gravel shift.
Torven was in his thirties, dark curly hair to his shoulders, a beard that had not been trimmed for ceremony, dark leather armor with brown fur at the shoulders that made him look broader than the cold allowed. He moved with the urgency of a man who had already spent too many hours getting this far and had none left for hesitation.
"Get a sure hit," he said.
His voice carried across the overlook without needing to rise. Serenya's bow rose with it. The string kissed her cheek. Far out on the grass below the ridge, the dragon turned its head.
It was massive: golden-orange scales with ember-glow between them, as if a forge lived under the hide and breathed through the seams. Yellow slit eyes regarded the three of them without haste. Around its front right ankle hung a thick rusty iron cuff, and from the cuff a heavy chain ran into the grass and vanished among the roots of a blackened stump. Stamped into the cuff's face was a medallion—a stylized dragonfly, four wings spread, body a sharp vertical line. The symbol looked almost delicate against the iron. It was not delicate in what it meant.
Serenya exhaled. The glow in her eyes brightened. The arrow's tip tracked a place just behind the dragon's jaw where scale met softer hinge.
Torven's hand closed on her shoulder.
The grip was not the grip of a commander correcting stance. It was alarm, sudden and absolute, the kind that arrives when a man sees the shape of a trap in the same instant his own order would spring it. Continuity fractured only in the body's sudden nearness: a heartbeat ago he had been on the horse; now he was beside her, leather and fur and cold breath, fingers digging into the strap across her chest as if he could haul the shot back into the wood.
"Don't," he said.
The word landed like a slap. The glow in Serenya's eyes flickered, then faded, leaving ordinary dark irises that took a moment to remember how to be angry. She turned on him with the bow still half raised, yellow feathers trembling.
"You ordered the hit."