Chương 306: 67. Frost Moon 1

Thornhold in the early morning looked like a patient who'd just come off the operating table before anyone had bothered to wipe the blood clean. The walls were the same walls. The doors were the same doors. But walk two steps deeper inside and you'd hear it—the wooden floors and the people's nerves making the exact same sound, that low, uneasy creak, as if the entire fortress was still adjusting to a new reality: oh, so these are the ones who survived. This is how they're arranged now.

By evening, that sound had faded a little. Not because the wound had healed. Because everything that needed to break had already broken, and what remained had no choice but to move forward. I stood at the edge of the inner fortress's training ground and looked up at the sky. The light hadn't fully died yet. To the west, the clouds had been burned by the last of the sunset into a sheet of deep gold and dark red, as if someone had taken a furnace and poured it directly across the top of the sky.

Half the horizon wore a kind of beauty that didn't feel entirely trustworthy. Wind came down from the battlements, rolling across stone and saddle leather, carrying with it the smell of dragon scale, iron fittings, and hide that had been baking in the sun all day. Honestly, it wasn't a pleasant smell. But for soldiers, it was more reassuring than incense.

Because it meant someone was checking equipment, someone was standing ready, someone was prepared to take off—and not just crouching inside the fortress waiting for fate to be in a generous enough mood to offer them a death that wasn't too ugly. Lei Lian's Yinglong Guard was already assembled in full formation.

Twenty-some riders, all in matching dark flight armor, saddle straps and suspension lines freshly inspected, dragon lances, crossbows, short blades, grappling hooks, and field dressings all returned to their designated positions. When the mounts lay flat against the ground, they looked from a distance like a row of black nightmares with their claws drawn in—impossibly still, and capable of tearing open the night sky at any moment.

Lei Lian herself stood at the front, her cape pressed flat behind her, the last of the evening light cutting sharp lines across her profile. She was looking down at the departure ledger in her hands, checking off each item one by one.

"Suspension lines secured."

"Confirmed."

"Secondary saddle locks."

"Confirmed."

"Night-flight lanterns."

"Confirmed."

"Emergency landing signals."

"Confirmed." Every question she asked, the unit answered in unison. Their voices weren't loud, but they were so perfectly synchronized that it made the back of your neck prickle. The advantage of working with people like this was that you didn't need to worry about them. The disadvantage was that they were too much like a military unit—so much so that if you so much as stood slightly crooked nearby, you'd start wondering whether you should preemptively write yourself a disciplinary report. I swept my gaze sideways.

Jessi, Alvira, and Lorelei. All three present. Alvira looked exactly as she always did—expression cold enough to suggest she wasn't about to board a suspension cage and fly out, but was instead attending an academic presentation too tedious to merit so much as a raised eyebrow.

Jessi was the complete opposite, circling the small hanging cage from every angle, knocking on the frame twice with his knuckles, with the air of a man carefully evaluating whether this contraption qualified as a mode of transportation or an instrument of punishment. And Lorelei— She stood beside the cage, wrapped in the heavy cloak I'd had prepared for her, her deep chestnut hair already tied back to expose the line of her neck and a sliver of collarbone.

Her clothes weren't military gear, but they weren't the soft, flowing skirts of the inner residence either—dark outer garments designed for night movement without sacrificing presentability, the waist sashed cleanly, the cuffs drawn in with precision. First-timers before a flight tend to fall into one of two types. The ones who panic from the feet up, and the ones who panic from the mouth out.

The first kind keep staring at the ground, then the sky, then the cage, like they're searching for the last place they'll ever touch. The second kind ask questions until you're genuinely tempted to just strap them in and let the wind handle their clarity. Lorelei was neither. She simply watched.

She watched the saddle rigging, the suspension lines, the Yinglong Guard, the great winged creatures as they lowered their bodies, as they gathered their muscles before takeoff, as their chests expanded and contracted with each slow, low breath. She watched with the kind of focused attention that meant she was committing it all to memory—so that if she did panic later, at least she wouldn't let it show too badly.

I was walking toward her when she tilted her head up to watch one of the smaller flyers extend its wing.

"Nervous?" I asked. She turned and looked at me. The evening light reflected in her eyes, the color warm and close, like firelight settling into honey.

"You've been asking that a lot today, haven't you?"

"Efficient classification method."

"Into what categories?"

"People who are terrified but refuse to admit it, and people who are terrified and honest about it." She actually thought about that for a moment.

"... I'm probably somewhere in between."

"Oh?"

"I'm a little nervous," she said plainly.

"But if I said I wasn't getting in, you wouldn't agree to that anyway."

"Of course not." I nodded.

"I'm not a bad person, but I'm not quite that accommodating either." She made a quiet sound, somewhere between a hum and a scoff.

"Then why ask?"

"Standard procedure."

"The young master is getting more and more like someone with actual authority."

"That sounds like an insult."

"It's not an insult. It's an observation." The corner of her mouth curved as she said it—not deeply, but enough to pull my mind straight back to last night, to the lamplight, to the way she'd looked when she said she'd come with me. Wonderful. My head should have been packed tighter than a supply warehouse right now, and yet here I was, getting reeled in by a single expression at the worst possible moment.

I suppose once you've finished dealing with everyone in your household who needed to die, you develop the mental bandwidth to start contending with more complicated problems. Such as the living. Such as women. Such as a woman you've known since childhood whom you can no longer honestly dismiss with I've known her since childhood and expect that to settle anything. I was about to say something when Jessi's head appeared from behind the cage.

"My, my," he said.

"How lovely." I didn't even look at him. I already knew exactly what kind of garbage was about to come out of his mouth.

"You'd better have last words ready."

"Don't be like that." He smiled with the sincerity of a con artist who'd just taken a sacred oath in a temple.

"I was simply going to say that this new companion of ours looks considerably more normal than anyone you usually keep around. That genuinely deserves a celebration." Alvira spoke from beside him, her tone flat as a blade laid on a table.

"So you're aware that you yourself aren't normal?"

"I prefer distinctive."

"No. The correct term is public disturbance." I ignored both of them and looked back at Lorelei.

"Get in." She glanced at the hanging cage. The thing was, objectively speaking, not large—iron-and-hardwood construction, leather-padded corners, reinforced base, exterior netting with buckled attachment points, designed for transporting personnel and light cargo. Theoretically very safe. In practice, it looked precisely like a flying cage specifically engineered to strip its passengers of every last shred of dignity.

Jessi climbed in first with the ease of long practice, sat down, and actually patted the frame in invitation.

"Come, come. Welcome aboard Border Air Transit. Minor drawbacks: no curtains, no wine, and a fairly high likelihood of nausea." Lorelei paused at the edge of the cage and glanced back at me.

"Is it too late to change my mind?"

"Yes."

"What a shame." She said it, gathered her skirt, and stepped in with a clean, unhesitating motion. Which was when I noticed something deeply unfair about the universe: she was climbing into a hanging cargo cage, and she somehow made it look better than half the noble daughters I'd seen boarding ballroom carriages. The contrast was so absurd it made me want to sigh at the sky and ask fate what exactly it thought it was doing. My life was already difficult enough.

Did it really need to keep adding difficulty in places like this? Alvira was last. She took the opposite side, settled in with her arms folded, and wore an expression that communicated, with perfect clarity: if this cage falls mid-flight, I will curse everyone on my way down. Right, then. One who never stops talking, one who could kill with a glance, and one who'd never done this before and somehow looked completely composed about it.

If this group ended up stranded in a mountain at midnight, whoever survived would have enough material to headline a border ghost story festival. I turned back to Lei Lian.

"Land outside Ponti Brown. One night's rest. Strict orders: no disturbing the villagers, no entering private homes, no using 'procurement' as an excuse to take what isn't yours." My voice stayed even, but it carried far enough for the whole formation to hear clearly.

"A small number may enter town to negotiate—trade for supplies, arrange hot food, replenish water. Everyone else establishes camp outside the town perimeter. Violations are handled under military law." Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Lei Lian nodded immediately.

"Understood."

"One more thing." I added.

"If anyone shows up at a villager's door wearing the face of a dragon rider expecting to be thanked for the privilege of their presence, I will personally demonstrate exactly what it feels like to be grateful for pain." Somewhere in the rear ranks, a few of the Yinglong Guard's shoulders tightened by a fraction. Good. I wasn't joking. This was the most predictable mistake a military unit could make after a victory—confusing we just won a battle with the civilians are our walking supply crates. The first was morale.

The second was savagery. My people could be exhausted, filthy, foul-mouthed, and yes, they could even be like Jessi—a walking, breathing, long-term public disaster—but they could not be the second thing. That line did not move. I turned and walked toward Ignicia. She'd been standing at the far end of the training ground this whole time, looking as though none of this particularly interested her.

Only when I came close did she lift her eyes—fire-colored irises catching the last of the evening light with absolutely no apology for how bright they were.

"Finally leaving?"

"What did you think I was doing out here? Admiring the sunset?"

"Could've been reluctant to leave home." Her tone was perfectly unbothered.

"You did clean the place up rather thoroughly these past two days."

"If by 'clean up' you mean hanging two and poisoning one, then yes, I'll admit the method was a touch aggressive." She made a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh. Then, without further commentary, she stopped talking. Fire rose from beneath her feet. Not the kind that spreads and wanders. The kind that had always been sleeping in her blood and bone, waiting for a single thought to call it up.

Red-gold flames climbed her body—fabric, silhouette, hair, the line of her shoulders—all of it swallowed in that scorching heat. The air around her surged warm in an instant. The people nearby stepped back on instinct. Even the mounts gave low, uneasy rumbles. In the next breath, the fire exploded outward. The woman who'd been standing in front of me was gone. In her place stood a true dragon.

Crimson scales ran the length of her spine down to the tip of her tail, the chest and throat armored in lighter, harder plating. When her wings spread, they split the remaining evening sky in half. When she lowered her head to look at me, the gold-flame pupils carried something that had clearly been built into dragons long before the concept of self-awareness: you had better know your place. Honestly, no matter how many times I saw this, it remained excessive. Other people rode horses into battle.

I rode a dragon that could breathe fire, deliver tactical criticism mid-flight, and correct your strategic errors without being asked. From a certain angle, my life hadn't been a series of dramatic highs and lows so much as one continuous derailment that had eventually just decided to happen in the sky. Ignicia lowered her foreleg. I stepped onto it, gripped the saddle lines, and swung up. Her scales were hotter than the night wind—hot like a layer of iron that breathed.

The moment I settled, she gave one impatient roll of her shoulder.

"Hold on." Her voice resonated directly beside my ear, low and felt as much as heard.

"I have no intention of spending the next year being laughed at because you fell off."

"Rest easy. Anyone who laughs at you for that probably won't make it to the second day."

"... True enough." There were certain areas in which the two of us had a rapport I preferred not to examine too carefully. I looked back. The suspension cage was latched. Jessi was sitting inside waving at me like a man headed to a countryside outing rather than a night transfer operation. Alvira had adopted the expression of someone desperately pretending she didn't know the person next to her.

Lorelei was gripping the cage frame, head tilted up, watching me—and a small strand of hair had been blown loose across her forehead by the wind. I had a very sudden and very inconvenient impulse to reach over and brush it back. Fortunately, the rational part of my brain engaged its emergency braking system in time. Not now. And certainly not in the middle of a training ground with the entire Yinglong Guard as an audience.

"Take off!" Lei Lian's command hit the air, and the training ground seemed to wake up all at once. The pressure from the beating wings nearly tore the loose sand off the ground entirely. Lanterns swung left and right. Leather, buckles, and dragon scale ground against each other in a chorus of sounds that made your teeth ache and your nerves feel strangely reliable at the same time.

The front rank moved first, the rear followed in sequence, each mount launching off the ground in turn—black arrows loosed simultaneously into the darkening sky. Ignicia's takeoff was something else entirely. She simply coiled her hind legs—and then the entire mass of her body lunged forward and upward, throwing the ground away in a single motion. The wind became something closer to a blade. The last of the sunset sliced past at an angle.

Thornhold's walls, towers, inner courtyard, and the small figures of people who'd only just started moving again—all of it shrank in the space of a few breaths into a dark, indistinct outline far below. I looked back one last time at the fortress. It had buried too many things I didn't want to remember. It had also kept a few people who were, for the first time, actually worth keeping. But either way—it was no longer the place that held me. It was the place I could come back to, when I needed to land.

Those two things were not the same. Not even close. The wind grew colder. I pressed my cloak back against the wind and looked down at the suspension cage. It wasn't swinging too badly, all things considered—but for someone riding in it for the first time, the simple fact of hanging in open air was more than enough to turn most people's complexions over to the night wind for management. Jessi, naturally, looked like a man who had personally defied death so many times that death had simply stopped trying.

He even found the time to point out landmarks on the mountain road below. Alvira had her eyes closed, apparently engaged in the grim internal labor of forcing the phrase I am currently being suspended in a cage mid-flight down her throat alongside each controlled breath—a humiliation she would be processing for some time. Lorelei was gripping the frame, her face slightly pale, but steady. She noticed me looking and held up a hand through the wind. A small, deliberate gesture: still alive.

I genuinely couldn't decide whether to call her brave, or simply note that the fact that she had the presence of mind to make hand signals while dangling over a mountain range was not something most people were capable of. Night flying was harder than the day, but faster. After leaving Thornhold, the terrain sloped gradually south—tree lines, streams, scattered farmland and barren hills all receding in layers through the twilight.

Once it was fully dark, the only way to distinguish human settlement from wilderness below was the scattered pinpricks of light. Roughly an hour or so into the flight, the outline of Ponti Brown finally appeared ahead. It was a small town—low wooden walls, fragmented farmland on the outskirts, a few main streets and a church spire further in. In the dark, the lights of the town looked like a handful of yellow beans scattered across black cloth. Modest, and reassuringly stable.

I signaled Lei Lian to keep clear of the town proper. The whole formation descended in sequence onto a raised grassy slope behind the town's outer edge. The wind from the landing wings sent dry grass flying in every direction. Several donkeys tethered at a distance immediately began braying in full-throated panic—sounding, collectively, like the entire town's dignity had just been stepped on. I was the first off Ignicia's back once we touched down.

She flicked her tail and exhaled a breath of warm air through her nose.

"I'm not changing back tonight."

"Up to you."

"You're not worried the villagers will be frightened to death?"

"I'm more worried they'll wander too close in the dark and get knocked flat by your tail."

"Hmph. Fair point." This dragon could be remarkably reasonable when the logic happened to align with her preferences. Lei Lian moved quickly to establish the night camp—outer perimeter guard deployed, brazier positions, mount stations, personnel rest areas, and water replenishment points all assigned in short order. I designated three people, had them change out of anything that read too obviously as military gear, and sent them into town with silver coin and tradeable goods: dried salt and cloth.

"Say only that we're camping outside, buying hot food, and replenishing water. Nothing more than that," I told them.

"If the townspeople seem nervous, let them see from a distance that we're staying out. No attitude. No extra talking." The three of them acknowledged and moved out at a quick pace. The rest of the unit began settling in. Some unloaded saddles, some laid out groundsheets, some started fires, some walked the perimeter. In a remarkably short time, the camp transformed from a chaos of wing-beats and iron sounds into a simple but orderly overnight position. I walked toward the suspension cage.

Jessi was first out, landing with the practiced ease of someone who'd done this far too many times, then immediately clutching his lower back with theatrical suffering.

"Ah. Border Air Transit is truly inhumane. Not a single cushion. My noble soul has sustained grievous injury."

"I wasn't aware you had a soul," Alvira said, stepping down with one clean motion, not looking at him.

"This is new information."

"I not only have a soul, I have a heart—a maiden's heart, in fact, once saved on a stormy night by a certain someone—""Quiet," I said.

"Yes, sir." He complied instantly with his mouth. His expression, however, retained the full, infuriating confidence of a man who knew exactly what he knew and was saving it. I stepped up to the cage and extended a hand to Lorelei. She looked at my hand. Then at me.

"I can get down myself."

"I know."

"Then why are you holding out your hand?"

"Because I want to," I said. She was quiet for half a breath. Then she placed her hand in mine. Her hand was warm—probably from gripping the cage frame the whole way, her palm carrying a faint, close warmth. I pulled steadily, and she came down clean. The moment her feet touched the ground, her legs gave a small, barely perceptible wobble. I caught her by the arm.

"Dizzy?"

"... A little."

"Good." She looked at me.

"You really love saying that today."

"Dizzy means you're still human."

"And someone who isn't dizzy is what, exactly?"

"Whatever Jessi is."

"I heard that," the man in question announced from behind us, raising one hand in formal protest.

"And for the record, I don't get dizzy because I have been forged by the winds of fate into a being of superior physical and spiritual resilience—""Or your skin is just thicker than most people's," Alvira said.

"You two are always picking on me."

"Not picking on you. Just habit," I said. Lorelei steadied herself against my arm, breathing slowly back to normal. She turned to look at the Yinglong Guard setting up camp nearby, then at Ignicia crouched in the dark further off, and finally let out a very quiet breath.

"So this is what it feels like," she said.

"Following you." I looked down at her.

"Regretting it?"

"A bit late for that now, isn't it."

"Mm."

"Then I'm not regretting it." She said it softly. Without a trace of humor in it. Something in my chest moved, briefly, like a draft through a window you'd thought was closed. Light. But unmistakable. Naturally, Jessi chose this exact moment to exercise his one true calling in life.

He stood a short distance away, arms folded, eyes making a very deliberate circuit between me and Lorelei with the precision of a man who had long since made a professional hobby out of reading people's business and filing it away for later use. He had all the energy of an old fox who'd spent years stationed by the road, watching which neighbor's chickens were the fattest. Then he grinned.

"The Third Missus." The air went still for a beat. My brain took a moment to process what it had just received. Actually—no. To be precise, my brain spent approximately one full second flatly refusing to acknowledge that those three syllables had actually been produced by a human mouth in my presence. Then I turned around.

"Jessi."

"Here."

"Are you under the impression that today has been insufficiently dangerous for you?" He was completely unintimidated. If anything, he looked more like a merchant who'd just caught someone trying to shortchange him and was delighted about it.

"I was merely using a respectful form of address," he said, with the gravity of a man delivering a scholarly treatise.

"Familiarizing the team with potential future interpersonal nomenclature in advance promotes unit cohesion and—""One more word and your hot meal allocation tonight becomes cold water and dry rye."

"Abuse of authority!"

"Correct. Watch me abuse it." Lorelei had gone very still. That face of hers, which had held up through a suspension cage flight and a dizzy landing without much visible drama, finally—genuinely—stuttered. The stillness spread to her ears, which were slowly taking on the faintest shade of red. Not the red of shock or embarrassment exactly, but the specific red of having something pointed out in public that you hadn't yet decided how to face yourself—so even the composure arrived a beat too late to be useful.

Alvira, standing nearby, glanced at Jessi. Then at me. Then said absolutely nothing. That was the most dangerous thing about her. If she'd cut in with a remark, I could have handled it. This—the silence, the eyes that had clearly already filed something away as confirmed—was the version that gave me a headache. I drew a slow breath and looked at Jessi.

"Go help the negotiation team count the silver."

"Yes, sir, Commander." He answered with admirable speed, and managed, on his way out, to turn back and deliver one final expression—the precise face of a man who knows exactly what game you're playing and finds it extremely entertaining. I sincerely hoped fate would one day present me with a legitimate, non-criminal opportunity to hit him. Lorelei was quiet for a few moments before she spoke, low enough that it was just for me.

"Is he... always like this?"

"He's usually worse."

"And you keep him around anyway?"

"Because sometimes keeping him alive and making him suffer under my employ is more cost-effective than the alternative." She laughed. The faint red at her ears hadn't fully faded, and the laugh made her look more alive for it—more present. The night wind, the campfire, the dragon, the grassy slope, the distant sound of a dog barking somewhere in the town—all of it suddenly had a strange, provisional, not-entirely-unpleasant quality of warmth.

From the direction of the town, the negotiation team was returning—hot food and several buckets of clean water in hand. Thick soup. Dark rye bread. Stewed root vegetables. A modest portion of smoked meat. Not a feast by any measure, but for a unit that needed to sleep and fly again tomorrow, it was more than respectable. I took one of the soup bowls and handed it to Lorelei first.

"Drink it. Get warm." She reached up and took it. Her fingertips brushed mine and paused, just for a moment.

"Thank you."

"Don't mention it," I said.

"You're getting back in that cage tomorrow. Getting sick tonight would be a poor investment." She gave me a look.

"Your way of taking care of people is genuinely strange."

"I know."

"But you seem to be in a good mood today." I paused. Was I? Maybe. The household was clean. The fortress had been handed off. The people who needed to come with me had come. And the unit in front of me was moving toward an actual front line. The wind was still cold. The road ahead wasn't easy. But at least this time, I wasn't being driven out a door and forced to keep walking. I was the one leading—people, a dragon, the past, the future—all of it, forward. Together.

The difference between those two things was not small. I looked south into the dark, toward where Fort Louis waited, like a splinter not yet pulled free.

"It's not a good mood," I said.

"Then what is it?" I thought about it for a moment.

"It finally feels like I'm walking in the right direction." Lorelei held her soup bowl and looked at me for a moment without asking anything further. She just gave a quiet sound of acknowledgment. And I stood by the campfire, listening to the occasional bark of a dog from the distant town and the low rumble of the dragons nearby, and felt, with some clarity, that this night was a kind of threshold. Cross it, and what came next was war in earnest.

The previous season had belonged to home, to old wounds, to the blood and ledgers of cleaning house. That account was settled now. What came next was settling the accounts of the world outside.