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"Goodbye, Norma." Luo Wei settled back into the carriage, fingers resting lightly on the window frame as she smiled out at the woman. "I look forward to your letters."
"I will write, goodbye, noble lady." Norma bowed low.
The herders stepped aside and watched the carriage and its Knights ride away.
Only when the carriage had shrunk to a barely visible shadow on the distant glacier did they climb to their feet, faces lit with excitement as they turned to Norma.
"Norma, can we go to Demon Island with you?"
Norma nodded. "That lady gave me many coins. It should be enough to rent a boat for all of us."
Thinking of her, a smile crept onto Norma's face.
The Demon Lord was all-seeing, prescient. He had known a kind noble lady would pass through here today, and so He guided them to this very spot.
Only a divine messenger of the God of Death and Time could possess such power , the ability to foresee what had not yet come.
The God of Death and Time. The one truly merciful deity in this world.
Only He would bestow miracles upon lowly commoners like them.
Those other gods, enshrined in glittering Temples, enthroned high above the clouds , they were nothing but pretty ornaments.
Norma thought, with a private twist of scorn: who says we Northerners don't revere the gods?
We just don't revere ornaments.
...
Under the open sky, the boundless ice plain stretched endlessly in every direction, bleeding into the horizon until there was no telling where the earth ended and the sky began.
The carriage wound through the valleys, the rhythm of hooves echoing off stone walls in overlapping waves.
Four days had passed since they left the Bidogit Highlands, pushing steadily west. Nearly six hundred kilometers behind them now.
A little over two hundred left to Exile City.
The ice plain was something else entirely compared to the glacier. The glacier at least held traces of life , the occasional scrape of something living. The ice plain was a frozen wasteland, uninhabited for thousands of years. Snow and ice several kilometers thick buried the land and the sea beneath it. A dry, razoring cold raked across everything, carrying noise from all directions — sharp enough to burst an eardrum , and yet the whole place felt impossibly, wrongly silent.
No one survived out here alone.
The dead-white expanse, where sky and ground were one undifferentiated blur, would drive a person mad before the cold finished the job.
Less than two hours after entering the ice plain, all six of them were lost.
Troy raised the bone whistle and blew. The Griffin came wheeling down from above, catching thermals as it rose and dipped, steering them along a broad, gentle route.
"Kree—"
The cry rang out sharp and clear above the white.
A few dozen kilometers later, Troy rode back from the front. "Miss, we've reached the northern border of West Tower Kingdom."
"Already? Let me see."
Luo Wei stepped out of the carriage and looked ahead.
"There." Troy dismounted and pointed toward a massive crevasse splitting the plain ahead.
"I see it. There's a stone fortress at the bottom." She glanced at him. "Should we stop there for the night?"
The ice plain at night was brutal , winds hitting eighty meters per second, temperatures that didn't bear thinking about. Worse, there was no firewood to be found anywhere out here. Spending the night in the open wasn't dangerous. It was a death sentence.
Fall asleep and you simply didn't wake up.
Troy saw it the same way. He nodded. "I'll go ahead and scout it first."
"Go. I'll wait here."
The fortress sat seven or eight kilometers out, wedged at the base of a narrow rocky spur deep inside the crevasse. Thick snow pressed in on all sides, as though it was only a matter of time before the place disappeared entirely. It was hard to imagine anyone choosing to build here.
Luo Wei found herself wondering how the people inside fed themselves. What they burned to cook.
Troy swung wide and dropped into the gully beneath the crevasse, his steel armor throwing flares of white light off the gray-black rock face. She watched him ride up to the fortress gate, circle outside for a while, and stop.
He didn't go in.
Something felt off. She scanned the fortress again. On a day this cold, there should have been smoke rising above the walls.
There was nothing.
"Yves, drive. We're going down."
"Yes, Master."
Yves steered the carriage along Troy's tracks toward the fortress, Gale and Beller riding close behind.
Her guess was right.
The gate had been caved in , something heavy had punched clean through it, leaving a ragged hole. Half the door lay flat on the ground. Several sections of the wall had crumbled, stone bricks scattered across the snow.
Inside was worse.
A dozen or more bodies were strewn across the entrance, limbs at wrong angles, clothing soaked dark with blood. Horse hooves had caved in their faces. The flesh had gone blackish-purple, shot through with dull crimson, and the ground beneath them was paved with something that had once been people.
The cold had stopped the decomposition. There was no way to tell how long they'd been there.
Luo Wei had Yves keep the carriage at the gate and went in on foot.
Stone houses crowded against the mountain slope inside the walls, each one oddly shaped, the construction rough and instinctive , like children piling rocks together for a game. She couldn't distinguish doors from windows. Every opening was the same size, the same shape, punched into the stone at random.
The interiors were dim. She moved through them one by one. No living people. No corpses either.
Almost no furniture. No pots, no pans, no bowls, no beds, no tables. In the corners, thick heaps of dry grass had been spread across the floor , their beds, probably. She found wheat straw mixed into one of the piles. So they hadn't been completely cut off. Whoever had lived here made occasional trips south, to areas with farmland, to trade for what they needed.
She stepped back and looked up. The stone houses climbed the slope in uneven tiers, stacked like children's blocks. None stood apart from the others. All equally crude. All equally derelict.
Hooves crunched closer. She turned.
Troy came around from the far side of the castle.
"Why'd you come over?"
"What took you so long?"
They spoke at the same time. Troy answered first. "I searched the whole place. No survivors."
"Figured." Luo Wei looked around slowly. "This place looks like it's been empty for a while. The bodies at the gate — can you tell who they were?"
"Probably descendants of exiles." Troy dismounted and ran a hand along his horse's neck. "In the old days, some of the exiled prisoners made it this far and couldn't go further. They built shelter out of the stones. Later exiles passed through, saw the houses standing, and stayed."
Compared to Exile City's open brutality, this place was crude , but it had been quieter. Simpler.
"There are plenty of forts like this scattered across the ice plain. Some herders use them in winter, hiding from bandits with their livestock. Unless you're looking from the air, you'd never find them."
"If it's that well hidden," Luo Wei said, her voice low, "why were they still killed?"
She meant the bodies at the gate.
Troy shook his head. "I don't know."
"Tie the horses. Let's go up." She gathered her skirts and started climbing the rough stone steps alongside the houses. "Did you check the upper level?"
"Not closely," Troy said, falling in behind her. "The houses up there are collapsed. I didn't think anyone would be living in them."
"Didn't think." Luo Wei exhaled sharply. "That's usually where people go wrong."
They picked their way up the shifting, uneven rocks to the very top of the fort. Nothing. No one.
No blood on the ground. No leftover food in the stone houses, no stored firewood. Everything stripped clean, like it had been looted to the walls.
A few small birds circled overhead , brown feathers, white bellies , calling out in clipped, fluttering notes.
"Snow buntings."
"Sorry?" Troy hadn't caught it.
"The birds." Luo Wei tilted her head back and watched them, a faint curve at the corner of her mouth. "They're called snow buntings."
She held Troy's gaze.
"Do you believe there are people here?"
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