The quill snapped.
Nora didn’t move. Ink bloomed across the parchment, a jagged black stain bleeding outward through the detailed grid of the northern patrol routes.
It was silent in the high tower—a heavy, suffocating quiet that made the quiet scratching of pine branches against the narrow arched window sound like claws against stone. Below, three hundred feet down the sheer obsidian drop of Ironclad Citadel, the winter river raged through the canyon. She could feel the vibration of the water through the soles of her boots. A low, constant pulse.
Or maybe that was her own blood.
She stared at the ruined map. The black ink pooled right over the narrow gap of the Serpent’s Spine—the single mountain pass connecting the Lycan territory to the jagged, ice-barren expanse of the outer reache
