“He’ll find us soon enough,” Sir Baramon said. The man stretched, groaning. “Every part of me is sore. Even my toenails ache.”

“Oh, do I need to take a look—” Brother Qown started to offer.

“I’m fine,” Sir Baramon snapped.

The count stopped smiling.

“Qown’s Blood of Joras, you know,” Dorna said. “Don’t treat the boy like he’s a local mare. Let him help you.”

“Blood of what?” Brother Qown said. “Wait, what am I?”

But Dorna had stopped paying attention to him. Her stare focused on Janel. “Foal? What’s wrong?”

“The Tiga Pass.” Janel pointed. “Look at it.”

Brother Qown turned toward the north. They had almost reached the switchbacked trails and bridges leading from the Grazings of southern Jorat, to the Great Steppes, where both Tolamer and Jorat’s capital, Atrine, were located. They’d come this way to reach Barsine the first time. While Qown preferred the trails to climbing the sharp steppe cliffs, it was still a narrow, unpleasant, vertigo-inducing experience.

But what made his gut clench was the pass’s color.

White as snow.

No one spoke, but they rushed to break camp. The count’s urgency infected everyone. Brother Qown found himself missing Cloud, the gelding Janel had given him when she’d first learned Qown didn’t own a horse. He’d never considered himself a horseman (and Dorna would be quick to point out this was still true), but Cloud had made himself easy to love.

“We could always take the Great Lift,” Dorna pointed out.

“That’s another hundred miles,” Janel snapped.

“Look at the snow. It don’t ever snow in Tiga Pass. If that dragon’s up there, we should be someplace else.”

“I have to be sure,” the count said, and kept walking.

Dorna cursed under her breath and exchanged a parental look with Sir Baramon, but he shrugged as if to say, What can we do? and followed Janel.

They all did.

As soon as they crested the pass, Brother Qown knew the count’s worst suspicions had borne bitter fruit. The Tiga Pass was the busiest and best way to travel from the plateau to the lower grazing fields. As such, the pass saw all the traffic too poor or stubborn to use the Quuros gate system. When they had come this way themselves they had stayed just outside town, too poor to afford to pay for hospitality and too proud to beg.

The experience had, in fact, been what inspired Janel to start hunting bounties in the first place.

Now the pass and the town lay under a glacial layer, frozen solid.

The count didn’t wait for them to catch up. She walked, then ran.

“Don’t you go leave us—” Dorna choked off her scold as something moved near the town’s far side.

Aeyan’arric, the Lady of Storms, raised her head from where she’d been napping.