The crossroads looked smaller than I'd imagined it, three narrow roads meeting at a patch of scrubby, wind-flattened grass, an old stone marker worn smooth by weather standing at its center like something that had forgotten what it was meant to commemorate.
Behind it, exactly as Garrick had described, the ground dropped away into a ravine thick with scrub brush and loose shale, the kind of terrain that swallowed sound and hid movement in equal measure.
I arrived at dusk on the seventh night, alone, exactly as instructed, my horse's hooves loud in the settling quiet.
Cassian Thorne was waiting at the marker.
He looked older than I expected, though I supposed twenty years of patient, careful work did that to a person, lean and grey-eyed in a way that reminded me, uncomfortably, of his s
