The morning fog didn't drift over the northern ravine; it bled into it, a heavy, freezing wool that clung to the jagged teeth of the shale cliffs.
Cassian stood at the lip of the gorge, his heavy obsidian-vanguard cloak pulled tight against a wind that tasted of impending winter. His boots were buried two inches deep in the frosted mud, his large hands resting flat on the pommel of his broadsword. The air was dead silent, save for the rhythmic, metallic clinking of the six elite scouts positioned below him in the brush.
Through the invisible, fragile thread of the pack bond, the ambient anxiety of the Crescent Stone fortress miles behind him still prickled at the base of his neck.
The council’s threat to freeze the treasury had left a bitter, administrative rot in his throat, but out h
