"That is the loosening," Orlaeth said. "It will hold for days if you do not take a sure hit on a bound creature. If you do, it snaps back harder. Do you understand me, bow-line?"
"I understand," Serenya said.
"And you, Ashmark?"
"I understand that my orders can become ritual whether I intend them or not," Torven said. "I will not intend them that way again."
"Intention is a soft bed," Orlaeth said. "Build something harder."
Outside the mountain, horns sounded—short, clipped, Ashmark pattern. Callen's head came up. Torven closed his eyes once, briefly, like a man listening to weather he had known since childhood.
"They are early," he said.
"They are afraid," Orlaeth said. "Fear gallops."
Serenya wiped her palm, bound it with the linen, and picked up her bow. The yellow fletching still looked like a small sun. She left it unnocked.
"We go out and talk," she said. "If talking fails, we do not solve it with my eyes."
Torven met her look and nodded, and for a moment the chamber held something that was not trust and not its opposite—only a shared refusal of the easiest violence.
Then they went to meet the clan.
The ivy wall's outer face looked different with riders in front of it: less mysterious, more like a bureaucratic inconvenience that happened to be carved with sacred geometry. Twelve Ashmark horses steamed in the mist. At their head sat a woman in her fifties with Torven's dark curls gone mostly silver and his same habit of looking at problems as if they had personally offended the schedule. A cloak of brown fur sat on her shoulders the way authority sits when it has been practiced until it looks like weather.
"Mother," Torven said.
"Captain," she corrected, then allowed herself the smaller word as a private mercy. "Torven. You opened the hold. You brought the Fen girl. You did not bring a dead dragon. Explain before the men invent explanations for you."