Patience, Toby was learning, hurt in a different way to falling. The fang of stone loomed over them, white against the hard blue sky. Up close, it still looked like something the earth had no right to grow—smooth and impossible, nothing for fingers to catch. The same mute refusal met his palm each time he touched it.

  Today they weren’t throwing themselves at it. Today, Maxwell had taken away the excuse of momentum.

  “Hands only,” the old knight had said at dawn. “No running starts. No leaping. You breathe, you ask, you wait. Then you pull. Again and again until your arms shake. Then you keep going.”

  So they did. Toby stood with his right hand flat against the stone, eyes closed, breath moving slow and measured. In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth. He tried to set the rhythm down into his bones, to match it to whatever lived beneath skin and will.

  He pictured the way Reece had described it by the creek—that trickle of something flowing out of him rather than in. As if the energy that usually shored up his muscles had reached instead for the rock.

  Push it in, he told himself. Let it seep. Don’t grab. Don’t force. For long moments, there was nothing. Just the warmth of sun on his neck, the itch of sweat between his shoulder blades, the smooth cool of the stone against his palm.

  He breathed again—slow, stubborn. Something shifted. It wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t even a feeling he could name, not properly. A faint drag, perhaps, where there hadn’t been one. A sense that his hand didn’t belong entirely to him anymore.

  He opened his eyes.

  “Easy,” Maxwell said from behind him, voice even. “Ask it to hold you. Don’t order it.”

  Toby swallowed, focused. He imagined the flow Reece had spoken of, imagined it running gently out through his hand instead of coiling in his chest. The connection thickened—barely, but enough that his skin tingled.

  He pulled, and his boots lifted from the ground, just an inch. Enough that the weight left his heels and his gut lurched with the sudden, boyish thrill of being somewhere he shouldn’t be.

  “Ha,” Zak said, somewhere off to his left. “I’m last again.”

  Toby didn’t dare look away from his hand. The stone held him. His arm burned. His shoulder complained in a steady, bright ache. He reached up with his left hand, fingers stretching for the wall above.

  “Don’t rush the second,” Maxwell warned. “Mind follows the first hand. If you abandon it, you fall.”

  Toby tried anyway. His left fingers brushed the stone, searching for that same strange agreement, that sense of being met halfway. They skimmed over blank, indifferent surface. His right arm shuddered. The fragile connection wobbled.

  “No,” Toby hissed through his teeth, clinging harder.

  The moment he clutched at it, the link slipped. The stone let go of him with all the ceremony of someone shaking dust from a cloak and he hit the ground feet-first, stumbled a step, knees bending hard. His right hand stung as if he’d been hanging from a rope and someone had cut it without warning.

  “Better,” Maxwell said. “You asked once and it answered. That’s more than yesterday.”

  “Doesn’t feel like ‘more’,” Toby muttered, flexing his fingers. The ache up his forearm said otherwise.

  “Feeling lies,” Maxwell said shortly. “Results don’t. Again.”

  Toby stepped back, rubbing his wrist, and let himself watch this time. They rotated without needing to be told. Reece stepped up next, shaking out his arms like a man about to face the butts with a bow. Deep breaths. Palm to stone. Eyes closed.

  Behind them, in the shade of the fang, Maxwell had set up his own work. The bison hide they’d scraped the night before was stretched on a rough frame of long leg bones lashed together with hide strips, pegged wide. The inner side was turned up, still tacky in places where thin strings of fat clung. The iron cookpot sat nearby, half-filled with cloudy water, strips of fatty tissue, and grayish clumps that Toby didn’t look at too closely.

  “You wash first,” Maxwell had told them earlier. “Blood out. Dirt out. Then you work fat and brain into what’s left. Keeps it soft. Keeps it from rotting too fast. A stiff hide’s as much use as a frozen river—pretty, and it’ll break your neck.”

  Now, as Reece focused on the stone, Maxwell scrubbed at a stubborn patch of flesh with the back of his knife, then dipped his hands in the cloudy mix and began to rub it into the skin with slow, relentless pressure. His forearms were already slick to the elbow. The smell was sharp and sour, riding under the usual tang of dust and horse and sweat. Live off the land, he’d said. Spend the time now or pay twice later.

  Reece drew in a careful breath and let it out. Toby watched his shoulders loosen, watched something in his posture change from braced to open. His hand stuck. This time there was no mistaking it. Reece’s fingers flexed and the skin didn’t slide. The stone seemed to hold his palm the way wet sand held a footprint.

  “Good,” Maxwell murmured without looking up.

  Reece pulled. His boots left the ground. His jaw clenched, the tendons in his neck standing out, but his arm held. Toby watched for the tremble—that telltale judder—and didn’t see it. Reece reached up with his other hand.

  Toby held his breath.

  The second palm found the stone higher up. For a heartbeat nothing happened. Then Reece’s body shifted—some small internal adjustment—and both hands stayed where they were. He hung there, feet dangling, eyes wide.

  “Two,” Zak breathed. “He’s got two.”

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  Reece gave a strangled sound that might have been a laugh. “I’m— I’m up.”

  “Now move toward the right,” Maxwell said. He still didn’t turn away from the hide. “Four placements. Then you can drop.”

  “Four?” Reece croaked. “Ser, I’ve barely got two.”

  “Then you have half the work done already,” Maxwell said. “Right hand. Small shift. Think of it as walking the wall instead of climbing it.”

  Reece swallowed and shifted his right hand sideways along the stone, feeling for where the connection thinned and thickened. Toby watched his fingertips creep, watched a faint line of tension run through his arms and shoulders as if some unseen thread inside him was being dragged along the surface.

  The right hand found a new place and held. One. He dragged the left after it, inches at a time, as if he were persuading his own fingers. The grip wobbled, then steadied. Two. His breathing had gone ragged. Sweat ran down his temples and dripped from his chin.

  “Slow,” Maxwell said. “You’re not outrunning the wall.”

  Reece grunted something that might have been agreement and shifted again. Toby saw the moment the concentration almost broke—the flinch at his own fear of falling, the way his shoulders tried to hunch. The hands moved anyway. Three. On the fourth reach, his right hand slid. Just a hair at first, then more. Panic flashed across his face—a tiny, sharp thing; Reece faltered.

  The wall discarded him with the same careless shrug it had given Toby. Reece slid down on his side this time, boots scraping, hands dragging hot lines along the smooth surface before he thumped onto the flattened grass. He lay there, arm flung over his face, chest heaving. Dust clung to the sweat on his neck.

  Zak whooped. “You mad bastard! Four! Well, three and a half.”

  “Four,” Reece said weakly, without moving his arm. “I’m claiming four.”

  Toby stepped in and offered him a hand up. Reece took it after a heartbeat and let himself be hauled to his feet, knees shaking.

  “That was further than before,” Toby said. He meant it.

  Reece’s mouth curled. “Felt further than the ride from Highmarsh.”

  Maxwell finally straightened from the hide and wiped his forearm with the back of his wrist, smearing a cleaner streak through the grime instead of removing it. “Good,” he said. “You found the path once. That’s the hardest part. The rest is walking it until your body knows the way better than your fear does.”

  Reece nodded, though his eyes had the glassy look of a man whose thoughts were a few strides behind his breath.

  “Zak,” Maxwell said.

  Zak groaned. “Of course. Save the worst for last.”

  He trudged up to the fang, squared his shoulders, and slapped his palm against the stone with more force than sense.

  “Breathe,” Maxwell reminded him.

  “I am breathing,” Zak said through clenched teeth. “I just don’t like it.”

  He shut his eyes and tried anyway. Toby could see him fighting the urge to grip, to treat the stone like a ledge that simply wasn’t there.

  Nothing happened.

  Zak tried again. He muttered under his breath, little prayers and insults tangled together. He pressed his forehead against the rock at one point, as if proximity alone might convince it.

  Still nothing.

  On the third attempt he dragged both hands down the surface with a growl of frustration, leaving nothing behind but a sheen of sweat.

  “Saints take this tooth,” he snapped. “It’s cursed.”

  “Stone doesn’t curse you,” Maxwell said mildly. “It just tells you the truth. You’re still trying to force it. You can’t shout the Art into listening.”

  “I wasn’t shouting,” Zak protested.

  “Inside your head, you were,” Maxwell said. “I could hear it from here.”

  Reece huffed a faint laugh, then winced and flexed his fingers again, shaking out the lingering ache in his forearms.

  Zak glared at the wall and went back in. And again. And again.

  Each time he came away with nothing more than raw skin and more colorful language. The nearest success he managed was a fleeting drag, a moment when the stone seemed to consider him, then turned its attention elsewhere.

  By midmorning, all three of them were shaking. Their palms burned. Their shoulders felt like someone had beaten them with clubs. The white pillar stared down at them with the same dull, indifferent patience with which it met the wind.

  “Enough,” Maxwell said at last. “For now.”

  Zak sagged in relief. “Finally.” He turned his hands up, examined the new blisters, and made a face. “I hate this rock.”

  “You’ll thank it later,” Maxwell said. “If it doesn’t throw you to your death first.”

  “That isn’t reassuring,” Zak muttered.

  “It isn’t meant to be,” Maxwell replied. “Go drink. Walk it off. If you still have arms after midday we’ll see if they remember what you taught them.”

  Toby flexed his right hand, feeling the faint echo of that moment when the stone had held him. It sat in his memory like the ghost of a sensation—impossible to catch twice by thinking of it, but impossible to forget.

  They led the horses down to the creek again, their steps slower than the day before. The animals snorted and tossed their heads, glad to be moving instead of standing under the glare. Hooves crunched through dry earth and flattened reed-grass.

  The water at the creek was lower, a finger-width shy of where it had been. The heat was stealing it even as it fed them. Oak plunged his muzzle in with a grateful snort; Daisy and Flint followed, tails flicking, sides still gleaming from the morning’s exertion.

  Toby knelt and cupped water over his raw palms. The cold bit like teeth, then eased into something close to relief. He tipped a handful over the back of his neck and let it run down his spine.

  Reece did the same beside him, wincing as the water found little cuts where stone and skin had argued. Zak contented himself with splashing his face and sitting on a flat rock, boots off, toes in the current.

  They didn’t talk much at first. Breath and ache took up space words usually filled. Only when the burn in his shoulders faded from knife-edge to dull weight did Toby finally glance at Reece.

  “Better than yesterday,” he said.

  Reece snorted. “If you call almost falling on my head better, then yes.”

  “You moved,” Toby said. “That’s something.”

  Zak blew out a breath, flopping back on his hands. “At this rate, you’ll be halfway around it by tomorrow. I’ll still be arguing with the first handhold.”

  “You’ll get it,” Reece said, though he sounded more tired than confident.

  Zak barked a humorless laugh. “Maybe the stone just doesn’t like me.”

  Toby thought of the way Zak met most problems—by planting himself in front of them and refusing to move, joking until fear lost its teeth. The rock didn’t care about that kind of courage. It had been standing longer than any of them had names.

  Before he could say anything, a sound reached them. A distant, low hum. Faint at first, carried on the breeze.