Breakfast came slow. They’d eaten at this little camp almost every day since they’d left Highmarsh, oats, meat, whatever the wild offered, but that morning the food felt more like a sentence than a meal. The world was soft with early light, the air cool against damp canvas, and the fang loomed just out of sight, waiting. Toby sat cross-legged near the fire, bowl in hand, and watched the thin oat mash slide when he tipped it. Someone—probably Reece—had stirred in slivers of storm elk. The meat gave it a richer smell than usual, but his stomach kept mistaking the knot of nerves for fullness.

  Zak was quiet. That alone felt wrong. He hunched over his own bowl, hair sticking up in directions even Flint couldn’t be blamed for, eyes sunk a little deeper from days of work and not enough true sleep. He scraped up bites and chewed mechanically, gaze flicking now and then toward the fang’s direction as if it might creep closer while he wasn’t watching.

  Reece ate the way injured men walked—steady and deliberate, as if forcing his body into believing this was normal. He didn’t fidget. He didn’t crack jokes. He just swallowed and swallowed and kept glancing at Ser Maxwell’s splinted arm like it might rearrange itself if he looked long enough.

  Maxwell himself chewed with the same calm he’d shown when they’d been storm-soaked and half-starved. One-handed, precise, as if he had all the time in the world and none of it could rattle him. His bow leaned beside him, his broken arm resting in its sling, his eyes far away on something only he could see.

  Toby forced down a mouthful and felt it land like a stone. Duty to the people required strength, something Maxwell had told them on those earlier days, whether it was back in the yard, or when they rode around Highmarsh. The idea that if the world handed him a body that could be trained and a mind that could learn, he owed it to more than himself to do something with both. Toby had liked the sound of that. It had felt clean, sharp—like the promise of a sword that hadn’t been forged yet.

  What he’d pictured were things like extra drills. Extra miles in mail. Sparring until his arms shook and his lungs burned. Not a wall. The word had always been a metaphor, before the fang. The obstacle normally occurred when feudal wars started and castles were taken. But to him, the wall was the hardest piece of road between what he was and what he wanted to become. Stuff Maxwell pointed out, or things Sire Ray had liked to talk about on cold mornings when breath smoked in the air and the squires still thought glory was something they could reach with a single step.

  Now the wall wasn’t a shape in a speech. It was a tower of white stone that had scraped the clouds only a few days ago, and some part of duty meant trying to climb the damned thing without falling and breaking more than pride. He spooned up more mash and made himself swallow it. Up till now, strength had been simple. Lift more. Swing longer. Run farther. Even the Art, for all its strangeness, had still been something he threw outward. Training was over; the time to make mistakes was over. Today, strength meant trusting his own hands not to lie.

  Maxwell shifted, setting his empty bowl aside. “Eat,” he said, as if they weren’t already trying. “You’ll want it when your stomach remembers what you’ve asked it to do.”

  Zak muttered, “My stomach remembers just fine,” but took another bite anyway.

  “Do you think it will feel different?” Reece asked quietly. “Going up instead of around.”

  Toby found himself answering before he could think better of it. “The ground will be farther away,” he said. “That’ll be different enough.”

  Zak huffed something that almost wanted to be a laugh. “Brilliant. That’s exactly what I was hoping to hear.”

  Toby’s mouth curved, but it didn’t quite make it to a smile. The truth was, he wasn’t afraid of height. He was afraid of failing with more space underneath. At ground level, a slip meant bruises, maybe a sprain. Up there… he glanced toward Ser Maxwell’s arm, to the way the splints lay straight and stubborn along the bone. Up there, one bad breath could mean someone didn’t come down under their own power.

  Duty to strength. Not glory, not looking good in a story later. He smiled then; Zak would tell him otherwise. No. It was the kind that meant being able to hold on when someone else needed him not to fall.

  “Stop if anyone starts to shake,” Maxwell said, as if he’d plucked the worry straight out of Toby’s head. “This isn’t a race. You climb until your mind slips. The instant your temper or your fear gets louder than your focus, you come down. You won’t impress anyone by breaking your neck.”

  Zak poked the last smear of mash in his bowl. “What if my fear starts loud and just stays there?” he asked.

  “Then you climb with fear and don’t let it choose for you,” Maxwell said. “You’re knights. You should be used to the feeling by now.”

  That, at least, sounded familiar. If the fang was just another version of that… Toby looked down at his hands. The blisters had hardened into half-healed patches, new skin tight and shiny at the edges. Old cuts were pale lines now instead of angry red. His fingers still ached, but it was a familiar ache—the sort that came after he’d spent all day with a scythe or hammer, when he knew tomorrow he’d pick it up again anyway. He flexed them around the empty bowl, feeling the small protests and the deeper strength beneath.

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  Walls, Toby thought. I’d always known there’d be walls. I just didn’t think I’d have to stick to one.

  Reece finished eating and set his bowl aside with a soft clink. “If we fall,” he said, matter-of-fact, “we fall onto grass. Not spikes or steel. Could be worse.”

  Zak squinted at him. “That’s your comfort?”

  Reece shrugged one shoulder. “It’s the one I’ve got.”

  Toby breathed in slow. The oat mash sat in his stomach now instead of his throat. His heart still beat faster than a quiet morning deserved, but it wasn’t going to slow on its own. He had to walk it into place. Maxwell pushed himself to his feet with a faint grunt. Even that sound held more patience than pain.

  “Boots off,” Maxwell said. “Belts tight. Start with a warm-up lap around at shoulder height, all fours. Then we talk about up.”

  Zak stared at his bowl as if hoping for sudden illness.

  “Now,” Maxwell added, a dryness in the title that made it clear he knew exactly what Zak was thinking. “Before you think of a clever way to delay and I have to assign you extra work to punish you for it.”

  Zak sighed like a man being led to execution, then scrambled to his feet. “You hear that?” he said to Toby and Reece. “If I die on this rock, someone make sure my epitaph says ‘died bravely resisting chores.’”

  “I’ll chisel it myself,” Reece said.

  “Chisel it at the top,” Zak said. “I want the world’s biggest tombstone.”

  Toby rose last. He gave Zak a grin. “You already have the world’s biggest head.”

  His legs felt steady enough; it was his thoughts that tried to slip. He tightened his belt, checked Falreth’s scabbard at his hip and removed it, then glanced toward the white curve of the fang rising beyond the camp.

  Duty to strength, he reminded himself. Sometimes it meant running at an enemy with steel in his hand. Sometimes it meant chasing the hunt for food. Sometimes it meant proving courage and putting palms on stone, trusting breath and will and a thing he barely understood to hold him a little longer than fear thought it could. Toby rolled his shoulders once, as if he could shake the last of the storm out of them, and followed the others toward the fang.

  The climb was a challenge, yet it passed by smoothly. It wasn’t easy. His arms still shook, and fear still crawled in his gut when he looked down. The wind worried at cloaks and hair, tugging harder the higher they went. But all the falls and blisters and stubborn days had turned the worst of it into something familiar. Hands first. Breathe. Ask, don’t grab. His palms found that drag more quickly now, the quiet agreement between skin and stone thickening under his focus. Feet followed, bare toes spreading, finding balance and purchase. Four points of contact. One at a time.

  He kept his eyes on what was in front of his nose—the next hand’s worth of white stone—and not on the drop below. It felt like crossing one of the old wooden bridges back home over a deep washout: everything in him sure the boards would give way, and yet each step held. Every time weight shifted, something inside braced for the plunge that never came.

  Below, Maxwell’s voice drifted up now and then. A word about breath. A reminder not to rush. Nothing more. Toby’s world shrank to hand, hand, foot, foot. The burn in his forearms. The slow ache in his calves. The way fear didn’t vanish so much as learn to stand quietly in the corner. By the time his fingers curled over the lip of the fang, his shoulders were on fire and his heartbeat had moved up into his throat. Zak grunted somewhere to his left; Reece’s breath rasped low to his right. Together, awkward and ungraceful and very much alive, they hauled themselves up onto the top of the stone.

  Toby lay there for a moment, chest heaving, ear pressed to cool rock. The fang was wider than it had seemed from the ground, a flat-backed spine of pale stone. Wind licked sweat from his face. His hands trembled, but they had not let go. For once the wall in front of him hadn’t been a metaphor. And they were at the top. He pushed himself upright.

  The view hit harder than the climb. Vast and wide in every direction. The wind was a gentle yet persistent reminder of fear and the truth of where they stood. The plains rolled away in every direction, no longer an endless sameness but a map laid bare. The storm had scrubbed the world clean; colors felt sharper, shadows deeper.

  To the north—or what he thought of as north, back toward Highmarsh—the plains stretched on in gentle folds, the creek that ran past their camp glinting like a strip of hammered metal. Farther out, the land darkened and sagged, turning to a smudge of gray-green that ate the horizon. The marshes. Or the first lip of them, at least. From up here they looked like mold growing along a cut, chewing at the edge of the plains.

  To the south, the grass didn’t simply fade into distance. It broke. A line cut the world, running east to west—a long, jagged gouge as if some god-sized sword had been dragged through the earth. Even from this height, the scar was deeper than they could see. Shadow clung to it. Beyond it, the plains continued again and went on, like nothing had happened, smoothed by distance into something that might have been forever.

  To the west and east, life moved. Dark humps of bison grazed in clusters, little flares of movement marking calves or quarrelsome bulls. Farther off, lighter shapes—deer, maybe, or some plains cousin—moved in skittish herds. Here and there birds circled, riding the updrafts, sharp black cuts against the sky.

  In the same direction Maxwell had been looking out to earlier and seeing nothing, tucked into a shallow fold of land halfway between fang and scar, sat a village. It was small. Maybe the size of Brindle Hollow, maybe half again as big. Enough roofs to shelter at least a hundred souls if packed in tight. The buildings huddled close together, most round and low, with reed roofs. A thin thread of smoke climbed from three or four points, whipped by the lingering breeze.

  No walls. No banner he could make out, even squinting. Just a cluster of life in land that, until now, had felt empty.

  Zak let out a long, low whistle. “By the Light—what happened to the land?”