Late season laid a thin, biting edge on the ridges northeast of Goldbarrow. The wind was a constant hand on the shoulder, not violent enough to push a dwarf off his feet but steady enough to make even a short breath feel underpaid. Skorik rose against it with his chin tucked and his hand hammer looped through his belt, boots testing each plate of scree as if he meant to challenge it to a duel and win by audacity alone. Bardrin followed at a set distance with a folded windbreak tarp under his arm and the guild map held tight against his chest, eyes down, counting paces against the crude scale he had inked in the margin weeks ago. Both knew the assignment for what it was: a trust posting that said, more than any words, we trust you not to do damage if we put you somewhere far from everyone else.

  “You’re lagging,” Skorik called over his shoulder. He did not look back. If he had, he would have seen Bardrin fix his mouth into that narrow line of patience he wore when he refused to rise to bait.

  “I’m measuring,” Bardrin said. “There is a difference between walking and measuring.”

  “There’s a difference between living and making a ledger entry,” Skorik replied. He stepped up onto a slab that shifted slightly, rode the tremor, and hopped onto a firmer tongue of rock, grinning at the way the scree hissed down and then settled again as if grumbling at being disturbed.

  Bardrin arrived at the same slab, tested it, and—choosing a different route—took three shorter steps around it. “Four near-misses last season,” he said, as if the words were not a fresh tally but a continuation of a conversation that had never truly stopped. “One misread quartz vein you insisted was wolfram. One hillside shelter that turned into a rain basin because you felt the cleft ‘had character.’ One contract lost because you called Master Gravar ‘Gravel.’ And one premature ‘strike the capstone’ shout that brought down a stope roof onto three journeymen’s backs. I keep track so we don’t have to pretend my memory is poor.”

  Skorik laughed. “You’ve polished the words as if you plan to present them to a hall full of jurors.”

  “Just to you, until you remember them as cause for care,” Bardrin said. He paused to wedge a flat stone under the windbreak tarp, and then pressed the map against a boulder to make a note: narrow ledge suitable for small camp, water unlikely, wind persistent. He shaded in a rectangle and labeled it in tidy letters. “Guild calls this pocketing knowledge. We call it not dying.”

  They reached the narrow ledge as the light softened and the day thinned out into evening. The ledge would do. The drop below it was enough to make a careless footstep memorable; the slope above tilted hard into a bare ridge crowned with broken gray plates. No trees. No soil to speak of, only seams of lichen and the occasional tuft of color where a hardy plant had decided the world was worth insisting upon. Skorik turned a circle to take it in and nodded out a verdict.

  “It will shelter, if the wind does not shift,” Bardrin said, as if the ledge needed his permission to be acceptable. He knelt, unrolled the windbreak tarp, and pinned it with three iron stakes and the flat stone. Skorik gathered the scrawniest wood a dwarf could call wood—a few dead scrub branches rattled free of a higher slope—and shaped them into a tight fire, coaxing flame with a sliver of charcloth and a long breath sheltered by his cupped hands. The fire answered like a shy animal and then settled into a small, honest burn.

  They ate with their backs to the wall. Hard bread, a strip of dried goat, a handful of dried berries that stuck in their teeth. Skorik chewed and gestured toward the map, smirking at the fine, precise script.

  “Why do you write like a scribe?” he asked.

  “Because the next pair sent to finish what we start shouldn’t have to squint,” Bardrin said. “And because if one of us cracks a shin, the other can still find his way without arguing with his own scrawl.”

  Skorik shrugged. He set his tin mug near the fire and watched steam rise off the warmed water. “We were posted here to cool our tempers,” he said, and grinned at the wordplay though he knew Bardrin would not give him the satisfaction of admitting it was clever. “Seems an odd way to punish. Plenty of dwarves would call this reward.”

  “Punishment is a long word for a short idea,” Bardrin said. “Master Dorla doesn’t want us hitting each other’s pride with hammers in front of apprentices. So we hammer stone instead. We do it alone so the stone is the only witness.”

  Skorik threw a chip of stone at Bardrin’s boot. “Then stop keeping witness and drink.”

  They drank. The wind combed the high ridges and made a low fluting sound at the edge of the ledge where the tarp snapped and then quieted. Skorik was telling a story about a journeyman’s contest—how he had broken a one-handed hammer swing record by tucking his thumb under the grip in a way that gave him another half-inch of draw—when the valley below spoke back with a deep, rolling sound that seemed to come up through the stone and into their bones. It was not thunder. It was too alive for thunder.

  Their eyes met. Bardrin sat his mug down on the ledge as carefully as if the mug might be listening. Skorik turned his head to the slope, nostrils flaring, the grin wiped clean with the ease of a man who enjoyed risk but did not deny danger when he heard it.

  “Who checks first?” Skorik asked, without challenge in the words. It was a real question. He stood but did not step yet, holding himself back with visible effort.

  “Neither from below,” Bardrin said. “We take a higher vantage and study the ground. The guild does not pay for dragon study. It pays for veins. And living dwarves.”

  “If we wait too long, we lose useful detail,” Skorik said. “A fresh track is a thing you read. A cold one is a matter of guesswork. A quick look from below and we come back up again.”

  “Your quick looks are—” Bardrin started.

  “—efficient,” Skorik said, grinning as if he could bully the word into fitting. He tugged his cloak tighter and slung the hammer, then nodded to the slope below. “I go. You keep a count, and after fifty heartbeats, follow at an interval. If I don’t whistle, you take the high. If I do whistle, you move to where you can pull my beard and call me a fool later.”

  Bardrin’s tight expression loosened around the edges. “There is no need to whistle. I will follow. I’ll insist on an interval.”

  “An interval, then,” Skorik said. He tested his boot on the first plate of rock below the ledge and recorded the sound in his head the way a smith learns to hear temper. He dropped into the slope with a patience that would have surprised a man who had known him only in taverns. Each step chose a friend and tested a stranger. When he lay his weight on his foot, he was ready to pull it again if the slope spoke back wrong.

  Bardrin began counting, lips barely moving. Fifty heartbeats later, he came on the same line, slower, letting Skorik be the stone tester. Where Skorik had stepped onto a rock like a challenge, Bardrin touched it, felt its answer through the leather of his boot, and leaned his weight only as far as he had to. He carried the map strapped to his chest with a leather thong and his charcoal tucked behind his ear.

  They sidled around a low fin of granite to a shallow bowl in the slope, and then they saw it. The nest lay in the center of the bowl, a circle as broad as a cart, rimmed with rocks that had been rolled into place and tamped by effort. It was bedded with sun-warmed grit and thin strips of shed bark, and in the nest sat a clutch of eggs, their shells mottled with russet and dull gold, each one as long as Skorik’s forearm. Even in the last light, the eggs carried a faint warmth, a way of holding the sun that made them look alive even without movement.

  “Too close,” Bardrin breathed, his voice now a thin line that would not carry beyond the boulder that sheltered them. He tugged Skorik’s sleeve. “Slow back, then up, and we record from above. Proximity is reckless. Nothing we need lies in that circle.”

  “We need the ground around it,” Skorik said, though he did not move. He was watching the eggs, and he could not help the way a question tugged at him. How long had they been there? How long since they had been turned? What marks had the mother left on the slope in her coming and going? If he were alone, he would have crawled forward just to see the shape of the claw prints, just to pick up a small flake of shell at the rim to see if it had a sheen.

  A shadow crossed the bowl and the questions ended with the simplest answer. The mother returned on spread wings that caught the last of the sun like hammered bronze. She folded herself down with a care that limited her bulk, landed near the rim, and nosed the clutch in turn, the long line of her head moving without hurry but with an attention that made the air feel smaller. Her scales were stone-dark with lighter edges like worn slate. The horned crest along her skull followed a practical geometry that needed no flourish. She did not make a sound at first. She touched each egg, shifted one a finger’s width, and drew a shallow breath through her nostrils the way a mother checks the scent of her own.

  Bardrin’s hand fastened on Skorik’s sleeve with more force than before. “Withdraw,” he whispered. “Now, Skorik. It is not our work to stand and judge her. We go.”

  Skorik nodded once. There was no joke. He made himself smaller, drew his coat tight, and began to reverse their route, placing his feet into the same steps with precision that turned their footprints into a single track. Bardrin followed, eyes flicking between the mother and the stones. The two dwarves were quiet enough to hear small grains of grit slither under their boots. Neither spoke. Neither looked away longer than they had to.

  It would have been clean if not for a soft seam. Skorik’s boot found it where the slope wore a thin layer over a skin of slick clay. He felt the difference in an instant, shifted his weight to correct, and the slope chose that moment to pronounce its own opinion. It settled as if exhaling and then released with a thin, mean hiss that rose to a voice as earth and small stones began to move as one sheet. The sheet flowed. It snapped loose like a banner in wind. It ran down toward the bowl and hit the nest rim with a sound that carried like a slap in a quiet room.

  The eggs nearest the rim sank by a third. Grit slid over their mottled shells and clothed them in a quick, smothering coat before the flow thinned and stopped. Skorik’s breath stopped with it and then came back in a hard surge. He threw a look over his shoulder that said all the words he didn’t have time to pick: bad luck, bad rock, bad seam—but Bardrin’s eyes were already beyond him, fixed on the mother.

  She reacted with the speed of a creature whose head had already been halfway inside the response. Her chest swelled and her wings beat once, heavy enough to throw dust from the nest rim. She launched with a scraping rise that brought the back edge of her left hind claw across a stone. The claw left a groove. She hung in the air three breaths and then angled her long body across the contour the dwarves occupied.

  “Lateral,” Bardrin said, voice so tight it was sound without shape. Skorik was already moving. The line of attack would follow the slope, not the steepest descent, and a sprint across the contour might buy them a blind spot. They ran in short, exact steps, conservative because loose stone punished drama. Flame came in a shallow, sheeting breath, not a spear but a low rake that skimmed the surface and bit into everything that stood proud. The heat reached first, like a wall. Beard hair crisped and curled. Cloak edges flared and then blackened, emitting a smoke that carried an acrid note like over-burnt pitch. Skorik’s left hand burned where the cloak parted; the skin went red in a clean patch with a border the shape of the cloth’s edge. Bardrin’s right sleeve smoldered at the cuff; he slapped it with the flat of his hand and left a black handprint that would later flake.

  “There,” Bardrin said, not wasting words on a full sentence. A darker line in the wall ahead offered a seam barely wide enough for a dwarf to squeeze through without his pack. Bardrin shoved Skorik at it with both hands. Skorik did not argue about order. He turned sideways, jammed shoulder and chest into the mouth, and wriggled through in a twist that left skin on rock. He felt stone catch his belt buckle and tear it loose. Bardrin followed with the map protected more carefully than his sleeve. The dragon’s second pass sent flame across the entrance. Heat tried to reach inside and failed. The constriction forced the fire to split. The sound reached them even as the flame did not, a hard roar like a kiln’s heart being stoked.

  They didn’t speak for four breaths after that. Skorik drew in air that seared his throat. He tasted ash and rock. Then he forced himself to give it shape. “Burn?” he asked.

  “Singed,” Bardrin said. He tilted his right arm and hissed as air met the fresh burn. The skin was red with the promise of shallow blisters at the edge. It would be ugly for a week and then peel. “You?”

  “Left hand,” Skorik said. He cradled it and stared at the patch of angry red along the thumb pad. “Superficial.” He poured canteen water over his palm slowly, letting it run and drip onto the ground, and then tore a clean strip from the inside hem of his shirt to wrap it. Bardrin did the same to his sleeve, tightening the band to keep fabric from sticking when the burn wept.

  Skorik pulled a small lamp from his pouch and struck a spark. The little flame drew a small pool of amber from the dark and showed them a narrow throat that bent inward. The fissure trended toward the mountain’s heart. Skorik’s first thought was that the dragon could not reach inside with fire, and his second thought—he would later pretend it had come second—was that the fissure might shelter ore. He held the lamp out and began to move. Bardrin breathed once, made his face smooth again, and followed.

  The throat widened like a clenched hand opening. They entered a space that was low overhead and broad across, a chamber formed when water had found a way through and then long since given up. The floor was mostly even, scattered with small chips that had fallen when the ceiling cracked at a past season’s freeze. The walls held the lamp’s light in a way Skorik liked, throwing it back off certain edges. He stepped forward and lifted the lamp higher.

  “Look,” he said, and the word held more than one meaning. The veins announced themselves even to a poor reader of stone. Bright metal streaked across the wall in bands a dwarf would call honest: iron in thick, dark lines with a red edge, copper in greenish tongues that had sweated out into a thin patina of verdigris along the seam. There was tin in a shy streak that would require work to free and would be worth the effort if the streak held. Bardrin moved close to the wall and put a finger near, not touching, as a man might do to a painting he admired. He nodded once, solemn to himself.

  “Good,” he said. He did not elaborate because he did not need to. The better part of their argument was a shared language of stone.

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  But the thing that held both men’s eye was the unfamiliar. It lay in a lode that cut through the known metals at a slight angle, dense and glassy in a way that felt contradictory to the eye. The surface was smooth where it cleaved, and under the lamp it made a faint internal sheen like a breath trapped in glass. It was not quartz. It was not obsidian; it lacked the brittle hunger of that stone. It looked like something that had started as one thing and then had been made another by pressure and time, and had forgotten to announce it.

  Skorik lifted the lamp closer. “What do you call it?” he asked.

  “I do not,” Bardrin said. He lifted his charcoal but did not write a name. “I will note the seam and bearings and leave the naming for morning, after we are alive again. This is no time to pretend knowledge.” He pulled the map free and anchored it on his thigh, sketching the chamber with quick, economical marks. He fixed the chamber against the outside world with bearings: the orientation of the fissure, the angle of the main iron seam, the rough measure of their steps from the mouth.

  Skorik marked the wall with a chisel sign, a discreet notch that would tell an Orehammer what an Orehammer needed to know without telling anyone else more than a clumsy ear and a guess. “If a child of Goldbarrow stumbled in here, he’d think this place a treasure hall,” he muttered.

  “A child of Goldbarrow would do what we are doing now,” Bardrin said. “He would record. Then he would leave.” He lifted his head and listened. Outside, the sound of wings came and then went like a tide moving past a mouth of stone. They both paused and held the pause like men holding a shared load. The wingbeats returned and then faded again. Low growls came up the fissure throat, more vibration than sound, and then those too fell quiet.

  They reverted to practice without being told. The lamp went to a low hook where a ribbon of iron lent it a place to hang. Skorik chose the known seams first with a small hammer and narrow chisel, freeing small, clean samples as much for show as for initiative. They would bring these back to the guild as a promise of more. He set the chips into a cloth bag that had once held salt and now smelled faintly of it. Bardrin took three pieces of the unknown lode no bigger than a dwarf’s fingernail, wrapping each in oilcloth so the surfaces would not scrape one another and so the light sheen would be preserved for a better lamp and a set of eyes that had spent a lifetime naming things.

  “Four chips of the unknown,” Bardrin said, and decided he had lied in the count even as he said it. “Three. Three will be enough and leave our consciences clear if someone asks how many we took.”

  “Now you’re being pious,” Skorik said, but he nodded and did not reach for a fourth. “We are not thieves, just poor and smart.”

  “Poor is a label that changes with the hall,” Bardrin murmured. He made a separate note in the map’s margin: unknown lode—glassy, faint sheen internal—take to Masters Hark and Dorla—caution in naming.

  They doused the lamp twice while they worked, standing in the dark and letting their ears widen. Each time the dark came like a physical thing that pressed against their foreheads. Wingbeats came once in the first hour and then not again. A scrape of claws on stone sounded at the outer lip and then moved away. They did not talk about it. It was a shared understanding that talking about a thing did not change its approach.

  They set watches by habit, though both knew neither would truly sleep. Skorik volunteered first watch and meant it. He sat near the entrance with his back against the rock and his hammer laid across his thighs. He kept time in his head, counting minutes the way he had learned in a contest where dwarves tried to hold their breath without fainting. He clicked his tongue when a minute passed. Every five, he slid a small pebble from his right hand to his left. When he had moved twelve pebbles, he woke Bardrin with a gentle tap of the toe, and the two switched places without ceremony.

  Bardrin kept count of samples. He sorted them twice, wrapped and then rewound the oilcloth with a neatness that bordered on hostility toward anything sloppy. He made two more notes on the map and then rolled it, tucked it under his belt, and sat with his back to the wall, ears tuned to the fissure’s throat. Once, in the long hours before morning, he spoke without preface.

  “I did not pull you toward the seam because I thought it would be comfortable,” he said in the dark. “I pulled you because the entrance offered a constriction that would force heat to spill. It was not kindness.”

  “Don’t ruin a compliment,” Skorik said without opening his eyes. “You found a hole and shoved me in it. I’ll call it competence and that will be our peace.”

  Bardrin grunted, which was as much as his humility could express without choking. “Your lateral sprint was correct.”

  Skorik smiled into his sleeve. “You say it like you’re naming a theorem.”

  “It is a theorem,” Bardrin said. “Heat spreads along contours in an open flow. I learned that in a forge when I was nine and set my hair on fire.”

  “You set your hair on fire?” Skorik laughed under his breath and then caught himself as his own noise sounded too loud in the chamber.

  “It isn’t funny to the hair,” Bardrin said, and in the darkness Skorik could hear the dry humor he liked best, the kind that kept a dwarf’s temper from boiling over. “Go to sleep. I will wake you if the mountain or the mother decides our discipline needs correction.”

  They slept a little in slices that never reached the bottom of the well. Skorik dreamed of a seam that could only be reached by crawling through a sleeping dragon’s ribs one by one, and he woke with his heart doing a hammer’s work in his chest. He got up and paced the edge of the chamber to settle it. Bardrin listened and said nothing. In the last hour before light, wind shifted and came into the throat with a steadiness that told them day was rolling up over the ridges. They waited for shadow to sweep across the entrance and none came. The absence spoke the thing they needed to hear.

  “Steady wind. No shadow,” Bardrin said, standing and flexing his right hand. The skin on his forearm had begun to pucker into shallow blisters. He grimaced once and then wrapped it again. “We go when your count reaches thirty.”

  Skorik reached thirty and then did not stop at thirty-one because he was not a man who taunted numbers. He nodded once and moved to the mouth, testing his hand against the stone. The heat from the night had bled away. He edged into daylight with the care of a man stepping past a sleeping guardian.

  The nest below was torn open along the rim. The scrape marks told their own story: the mother had stripped away the soil and grit thrown by the slide and then dragged stones to rebuild the rim. Eggs lay uncovered again, faintly sheened by morning light. One bore a smear of dirt that would not brush off easily but showed no crack. Skorik felt a small, selfish gratitude that he had not broken what he had not meant to touch. In the slope, a few fresh gouges laid a map of the mother’s movements; he could read where she had braced and where she had pushed. He did not linger to trace the whole. He felt his neck prickle and he remembered he was alive because he did not linger when lingering invited trouble.

  They climbed back to the ledge with a discipline that looked like silence. At the ledge, the camp was a scorched mess of practical statements. The tarp carried holes where embers had landed and eaten through. The wind had not shifted, which meant the fire’s smoke had been pulled away from the ledge and carried thin. Their small stack of kindling had vanished to ash.

  Skorik stamped out the last mean glow in the corner that wanted to pretend it was a coal. Bardrin picked up their packs from where he had left them under the windbreak and examined them. One had a charm scorched off—nothing magical, just a bit of hammered tin he had shaped into a circle that clicked a certain way when it was hung. He frowned at the absence and then let it go. They salvaged what they could: the boiling pot with a new black rim, the tin mugs, the little sack of barley with a scorched patch that had not penetrated. Bardrin scratched a line in the map by the ledge marking fire damage because he believed no detail was wasted if a dwarf paid attention.

  Skorik cinched his pack and heaved it onto his shoulders with a grunt that was part performance and part honesty. He stood and rolled his singed shoulder to make the joint remember it was a friend. “You pulled a tight seam out of a wall with your eyes,” he said to Bardrin, the praise sounding strangely formal coming from his mouth. He wasn’t used to paying compliments that weren’t wrapped in jest. “And you shoved me in before I could argue. I’m not dead because of the distance between your eye and your hand.”

  Bardrin looked at him, weighing the words with the seriousness he would give ore assaying. “You stepped lateral and bought us the glide,” he said. “Rashness has a place when it sits on a spine. Competence is an equal share.”

  Skorik grinned. He couldn’t hold seriousness for long without it slipping. “You speak like a ledger. Equal share? I led.”

  “You stumbled into a seam and set a slide,” Bardrin answered, but there was no sting in it, only a clean wit. “You also saw quickly and ran correctly. We will report what we did. We will let the guild master sort our egos from our facts. The find will be the prize, not the story we tell about leading.”

  “The unknown lode will sing to the Masters,” Skorik said. He patted the oilcloth-wrapped chips in his pack. “It shines like something worth a bottle. Hark will want to name it in front of Dorla and pour the first cup.”

  “The unknown lode will require more study than a bottle can cover,” Bardrin answered. “We will hand it to them. They will hand us a project. That is how this goes.”

  Skorik snorted. “You’re setting me up for a courtship and calling it work.” He gestured toward the west, the safer ridgelines that would run them southwest toward Goldbarrow. “We’ll argue the split all the way to the hall. It gives the wind something to listen to.”

  “The guild rule sets equal division between partners unless a foreman is named,” Bardrin said, as if he were reciting a prayer. “No foreman was named. We split equal. We argue for sport because it keeps our tongues warm.”

  Skorik pretended to be offended and then let the pretense fall because the wind would blow it out of his mouth. “I will say I led. You will say rules are rules. The truth will sit between us and shake its head.”

  They moved. They chose ridgelines that the wind had cleaned of loose stone and used the crests to keep visibility high. Skorik loved the high places because everything was honest there. A rock would declare its character with a sound and a feel, and a man could read it without guessing. Bardrin loved them because the lines made sense and he could see two turns ahead. They made decent time for men with singed edges and burns that throbbed with each heartbeat in a way that made counting easy.

  They argued, but the argument was a good one that carried no heat. Skorik told a story about an apprentice who had mistaken a quartz spall for diamond because it caught a candle just so. Bardrin countered by recounting how Master Dorla had taken that same apprentice and made him spend two days sorting gravel into six shades until the boy’s eye had learned a lesson no words could teach. They met a mountain goat at one pinch where the ridge narrowed to a hand’s breadth, and the goat regarded them with the flat, unconcerned stare of a creature that was sure of its feet and sure it would rather not yield. Bardrin clicked his tongue softly and stood still. Skorik bowed like a jester. The goat sniffed once, considered, and then stepped sideways onto an impossible ledge and slid past as if the mountain had grown a path exactly the width of a goat’s ankle.

  Around midday they found a pocket of shelter where the wind quieted enough to warm their hands. Bardrin examined his burn, cleaned it with water, and did not complain. Small blisters had risen along the edge, full and glossy. He pressed around them but did not break them; he knew enough to let the skin keep its own sterile cover for a day. Skorik checked his thumb pad and found that the swelling was honest but not troublesome. He flexed his hand and made a face that was more performance than pain.

  “You’ll keep your jokes?” Bardrin asked.

  “I’ll keep them,” Skorik said. “I’ll tell them quieter when we pass a nest in the future.”

  “You will set a better foot when we pass it,” Bardrin said.

  Skorik nodded, a genuine concession. “I will.”

  They climbed again as the day drew down, their shadows stretching thin and gray. The sky did not threaten snow, but the air carried a taste that said the next weather would be edged. They moved faster without hurrying, and the speed came from not having to argue about direction. When Skorik wanted to follow a line that looked like fun, he looked at Bardrin and saw the small shake of his head that said the snow would pool there and turn a man’s knee inside out. When Bardrin wanted to contour along a safe shelf that would add an hour, he looked at Skorik and saw the tilt of his head that said the light was thinning and risk had to be matched to sun.

  Later, as they crested a low shoulder, Goldbarrow’s direction announced itself not by sight but by a faint loom in the western haze that only a man who had long walked the ridges learned to see. The wind shifted a thread and carried a smell like smoke so thin it was more memory than scent. Skorik lifted his head and smiled because there was nothing like the thought of a hall’s warmth when a dwarf’s nose was raw from wind and old stone dust.

  “You’ll stand in the hall and claim your larger share,” Bardrin said, his tone as dry as a salted kiln brick but not unkind.

  “I will,” Skorik said, without shame. “I’ll say I led. I found the view. I made the first step. I took the first heat. I marked the wall.”

  “And I’ll say we walked together, and that the guild pays for partners who live and deliver. I’ll say our work was divided by luck and by habit. I’ll say the unknown lode will feed more bellies if we split our pride and keep to the rule,” Bardrin replied.

  Skorik laughed, then winced at the way the laughter shook his shoulder where a scorch still complained. “And Master Dorla will look at us and ask if either of us want to be foreman, and we will both pretend to consider and then decline because foremen spend their time making peace instead of breaking rock.”

  “I won’t pretend,” Bardrin said. “I’ll decline immediately. I like stone better than people.”

  Skorik looked sideways at him, amused. “You like me.”

  “I tolerate you with affection,” Bardrin said. “It is not the same thing.”

  They went on. Small things filled the spaces where larger dangers were absent: a raven that flew low and watched them with one eye; a patch of ground that sounded hollow underfoot where frost had pried a sheet of rock a finger’s width away from its bed; a thread of old spiderweb in a fissure that told Bardrin the fissure had been dry for at least a season. Each detail built a quiet ledger in both their minds, and if one saw something the other missed, he spoke in a sentence so short it was a tool, not a story.

  In the late afternoon they stopped on a spur where the granite’s color shifted toward a colder gray and the lichen took on a pale green tone like old copper. They ate again. The food was always better after a danger survived, not because it tasted different but because the mouth remembered it as proof. Bardrin took the chips of the unknown lode out of his pack and held one up to the light. It showed that faint internal sheen even in the flat day. He did not name it. He would not. He wrapped it again and tucked it away with a small care that insisted upon respect.

  “We’ll walk into the hall singed and proud,” Skorik said around a mouthful, then swallowed to answer his own mother’s ghostly scowl against talking while chewing. “We’ll put this glassy thing into Hark’s palm. He’ll squint and Dorla will purse her lips and then Hark will shout for a better lamp and Dorla will make him sit down and not wave his arms until he breaks something.”

  Bardrin allowed himself a soft snort. “That is a good picture because it will happen exactly as you describe. And then they will send a measured team with stakes and rope and a cart of tools, and they will ask us to lead them back to a dragon’s nest and to do it without dying. They will pay us hazard. They will not insist on heroism.”

  “I don’t want heroism,” Skorik said. “I want the first chip of a new seam and a bottle in my name.”

  “You want the shouting,” Bardrin corrected.

  “I like the sound of my name when other people use it,” Skorik admitted, unbothered by the baldness. “It reminds me I have one.”

  They rose and moved again. The light had the flat tone that comes when day is tired but unwilling to sleep. They planned to make a low saddle before dark and camp just below its crest, where the wind would break and the night would not sneak a drift into their blankets. Skorik pointed to a line of quartz blebs that could serve as ticks in their path, a kind of waymark that would glint if moon came. Bardrin nodded and made a note without stopping. Even his pen-strokes had a pace.

  As the sun slipped and the ridges took on that two-tone look—light on one flank, shadow on the other—they cleared a last set of tumbled blocks and reached the saddle’s run. On the far side the land fell into a basin that would eventually feed the Hillswater. In the near distance the ridges they had walked seemed like the hides of sleeping beasts lined in a row. Skorik took one long breath, winced at the pull on his burned shoulder, and let it out slow.

  “You hear that?” he asked.

  Bardrin stopped and listened. The wind did its constant song. Rock answered underfoot with that dry, nearly musical rasp. Far, far behind them, so far it might have been their nerves, a low sound rolled once and came apart in the bowl of air above the slopes. It was not thunder. Bardrin knew thunder. He looked over his shoulder at the northeast and then forward to the southwest, where Goldbarrow lay behind the next two deeps and three shoulders.

  “I hear it,” Bardrin said. He did not put a name to it. He did not need to. “We keep moving.”

  Skorik nodded and did not joke. He set his feet on the safe line Bardrin indicated, and Bardrin walked alongside him. They let the wind take the last of the heat out of their scorched clothes and leaned into the age-old rhythm of dwarves who had to get from one ridge to another before night made stupid suggestions.

  Above them the sky did that final slide into evening, and the first honest star pricked through the gray. Skorik touched the pouch where the unknown lode lay wrapped and felt its weight as proof. Bardrin patted the rolled map at his belt to make sure it still held the lines he had laid down in the dark. The Granite Crowns kept their own counsel behind them. Goldbarrow waited ahead with its loud guild hall and the arguments that would be made in orderly fashion.

  They did not quicken. They did not slacken. They went on in a line of two across the saddle, and the wind moved past them like something that had been here before both dwarves had been born and would be here long after. The open end of their day did not close. It held like the mouth of a new seam, promising more when a hammer came back with better light and stronger hands.

  Episode 9 continues in Episode 21.