RIDING WITH THE BEAST
CHAPTER 62: THE ROAD BEYOND THE HILLS
Three days after the harvest feast, a party of riders appeared on the eastern skyline, moving slowly and with care, carrying no banners and bearing no weapons beyond the knives at their belts. They came from the river lands far beyond the ridges we had always marked as our edge — places the old order had claimed but never truly ruled, where people had lived by their own rules and kept mostly to themselves. When they reached the gates of Black Rock, their leader stepped forward, an older woman with silver streaks in her dark hair and a scar running along her jaw, and asked only for leave to speak plainly.
We gathered in the outer courtyard, where the air smelled of drying grain and turned earth. She told us that word of the New
