He ascended over Cache Mountain, heading for the pass with a latent muscle memory. The clouds fogged him in now, but he held course, his eye on the compass, and in a few moments, cleared the white.

He released his breath, not realizing he’d been holding it.

Above the cloud line the sky was clear, a deep indigo, the sun still a ball of fire behind Denali.

This. This was freedom. This was where he could feel his heartbeat, seize the life he’d longed for.

This was where his dreams lived.

Denali rose eighteen thousand feet to his north, brutal and bold, snow-packed, undefeated. Thick clouds lay in the deep pockets of the range, between Hunter and Moose Tooth and Foraker, and he had no doubt that a few deadly storms raged at the higher altitudes.

He could stay forever up here, in the silence of the sky, waiting for the stars, the aurora borealis to ribbon across the horizon . . .

Ice started to form a sheet over his windshield. And then he felt the plane begin to drag.

Ice on the wings, the struts, the tail. Thankfully, the props didn’t seem to be icing up yet.

But he needed to descend, get to warmer air.

He pushed the yoke in, began his descent into the cloud clutter, his eye on the altimeter. If he remembered this area correctly, he was in a corridor of riverbeds and low forests, but he sweat a little when he didn’t break through at two thousand, one thousand—

It wasn’t unheard of for pilots descending to warm temperatures to fly right into a mountainside, the cloud cover so low.

He broke free at 550.

His heart restarted. Especially when he spotted the lights of the various homesteads of the valley guiding him home.

Starr Lodge, a handful of other homes, and of course his gaze fell on the Yazzie homestead. Lights blazed in the windows that overlooked the river.

He followed that river north until it curved east, and then the tributary south, and at the end of a small lake, he spotted Sky King Ranch.

From the air, he could still trace every inch of what it had been before the big fire had taken out so much of it a few years ago. Gone, at the far end of the lake, was his grandmother’s cabin, where Larke had lived after she returned from the Army. The handful of cabins situated on the other edge of the lake remained, however. He’d taken up residence in one of them.

On the hill above sat the lodge, all hand-hewn log with a wraparound porch and a massive stone fireplace. The old red barn that still housed his motorcycle and a few other vehicles sat a stone’s throw away, and at the end of a large runway, the Quonset hangar.

He called in his approach, and of course his father confirmed. Had probably been working in his office for hours.