The days after the blizzard slipped past in a muted stretch of cold and quiet.

  Elowen stayed mostly inside the tent. No one asked anything of her, and she offered nothing back. Her bruises darkened, then softened; the tremor under her ribs dulled from sharp to tolerable. She slept too much, spoke too little, and let the world shrink to the space she could endure.

  By the third day, her feet no longer felt the cliff beneath them.

  Someone had left her things neatly folded beside the cot—her boots, her cloak, her staff, and a book she had brought from Eryndor’s library. The neat order of it all was unmistakably Roderic’s. When she picked the book up, a slip of parchment slid out and landed across her lap.

  Eryndor’s handwriting cut straight down the page:

  From the broken blood shall rise the walled heart,

  bearing the shield of silence and storm.

  She who runs shall scatter crowns to dust;

  The brazier popped softly.

  She didn’t look up.

  Her thumb traced the line that never failed to catch on something inside her:

  She who runs shall scatter crowns.

  She didn’t know if she’d truly stopped running after the cliff, or if there had simply been nowhere left to run.

  She folded the parchment sharply, trying to quiet the echo it left behind.

  Her flute rested near the brazier, its silver body warm where the firelight touched it. She reached for it—her fingers drawn to the one thing in Eryndor’s world that hadn’t felt like a burden.

  The metal was cool beneath her hands.

  She lifted it to her lips.

  The first note wavered. The second steadied. The third softened into the tent’s thin warmth, threading through the crackle of fire and the faint whisper of snow brushing the canvas.

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  She played the way she breathed when words lodged in her throat—quiet, searching, listening for something she didn’t yet understand. The melody wound slowly around her, curling through the cold air like a fragile thing trying to find its shape. Once found, it filled the tent and enveloped the space in a sound that seemed to lift everything from the ground.

  She didn’t hear Roderic enter.

  Her eyes were closed. She felt it first—a faint shift in air pressure, a colder thread drifting across the tent as the flap opened.

  The last note held on, warm and soft, before surrendering to silence. She lowered the flute.

  He stood just inside, snow melting in droplets along his cloak, ink staining two fingers. His expression eased into something unreadable and intent—recognition, maybe, or curiosity.

  “You feel the air as much as you hear the notes,” he said. “I remember Eryndor mentioning that once.”

  Her pulse hitched. “It’s nothing.”

  “It isn’t.” His brow frowning in concentration.

  He set her staff within reach, then stepped back as if careful not to press too close. “I want to test something. Let’s go outside.”

  She took the staff and followed him outside. She stopped and her gaze flicked to the folded cloth in his hand. A shadow of heat and darkness swept her ribs. Then faded.

  “What do you have in mind?,” she asked expectantly.

  He approached slowly, meeting her eyes as he lifted the cloth—giving her every chance to pull away. When she didn’t, he tied it with deliberate, careful fingers. Darkness settled—soft, immediate. Her breath faltered before she caught it.

  “Listen,” he said. “The way you did with the flute. Feel what shifts around you.”

  He moved.

  And the air moved with him.

  A shift.

  A subtle change in pressure.

  A whisper of cold drifting across her cheek an instant before the strike came.

  Her staff lifted—

  wood cracked against wood.

  Another strike—lower, sharper.

  She caught it late; pain sparked across her shin, bright and brief.

  He didn’t warn her.

  He didn’t speak.

  He let the air speak first.

  She missed as often as she met him, but every time her staff found his, something in her chest aligned. Something that felt like instinct finally remembering itself.

  When he stepped back, she pulled the cloth away.

  Roderic watched her with the steady focus he usually gave maps—measuring, adjusting, seeing the shape of something forming.

  “Well?” she breathed.

  “You fight better without your eyes,” he said. “You read the air.”

  Elowen tightened her grip on the staff.

  The instinct to run still lived beneath her ribs—trembling, familiar.

  But it no longer controlled her breath.

  Roderic took her in for another heartbeat, then gave a single, almost imperceptible nod—

  as if he saw something she hadn’t yet dared to see in herself.