Lady Lethren broke the spell by walking straight through the choke point, chin up, cloak trailing behind like a dare. The squad adjusted, fanned, flowed after her with a discipline he didn't know they possessed.

Soren felt the tension sublimate, but not dissipate, evaporated from the air and condensed directly into the team's muscles, ready to flash-freeze at the next problem.

The corridor pinched, then spilled out into a shallow basin. Soren saw, from the tracks in the mud and the snapped brush, that they were not the only ones using this route, but whoever else had traveled here did so with more care, or more fear.

He counted four sets of bootprints, two light, two heavy, and all veering off the trail before the clearing. He let it register, then passed the nonverbal to the twins, who each peeled off in turn to check the perimeter.

Kale whispered, "Remind me whose bright idea it was to guard the only person less popular than the swordmaster?"

Soren said, "Yours. You drew the short straw."

Kale grinned, then immediately wiped it off his face, as if remembering the world was still watching. Liane returned with nothing but a shrug and a quick gesture, no movement, no scent of magic, no sign of traps.

They made camp at the next rise. Lethren did not ask permission, simply dropped her pack at the base of a stunted pine and produced a flask. The light was thickening toward dusk, the world tinged with the sort of gold that made every bruise look like a medal. The twins set up a lazy watch pattern; Jannek built a fire with a competence that suggested he'd been doing it since before he could walk.

Seren took the first perimeter, walking the fifty paces up and down, never once looking back at the fire. Soren watched her, not because he didn't trust her to hold the line, but because something in the rhythm of her stride reminded him of home, or at least the place he used to be before all this started.

Lady Lethren uncorked her flask and gestured at Soren. "Drink?"

He shook his head.

"Discipline," she said, admiring or mocking, he couldn't tell. "That's what they say about your class. All blade, no edge. I never believed it myself."

He let the silence ride. She seemed the type who only noticed resistance if you let her.

She sipped, then asked, "Why do you suppose they put you in front?"

He said, "Because if I die first, it's easier to remember what not to do."

She laughed, dry and sharp. "A pessimist. Dane always did like them that way."

He didn't ask how she knew Dane. Didn't have to. The world of masters was small, and everyone above you once trained beside someone you'd eventually have to impress or kill.

The night dropped cold. The squad rotated shifts, the twins arguing in a near-whisper about the best angle for sightlines, Kale fidgeting with his bootstraps and making up obscene limericks under his breath. Jannek sat close to the fire, hands outstretched, eyes emptied of anything but the glow of the embers.

Soren watched them all, logging the changes: who blinked more, who flexed their hands, who pretended not to notice how exposed they really were. It was a comfort, in its way, to see the theory of containment applied to actual humans and not just the stories they told at the Academy.

The first real threat came at midnight.

It was not the textbook version: no massed charge, no wailing mob out for blood. Instead, it was an absence, a zone of silence that crept up the ridge and pressed the firelight flat, as if a mouth were fitted over the camp and sucking out sound.

Soren woke from half-sleep into the quiet, immediately registering the wrongness. He reached for his sword, found it already in his hand, then looked at the rest of the squad. All awake, all frozen. Even Lady Lethren, eyes wide and eerily luminous in the fireglow, sensed it.

A figure detached from the dark. Not a man, not a woman, but a body sized right for either, wrapped in gray cloth, face masked save for the eyes. The eyes did not reflect light.

Soren did not move.

The figure advanced two steps, then stopped at the edge of the firelight, raising empty hands.

Seren spoke first, her voice a dry snap in the silence. "Identify yourself."

The figure said nothing, only gestured with both hands, a sign Soren recognized from the old codes. It meant: "I am not here to kill."

Seren, either knowing the code or pretending to, lowered her blade a millimeter.

Soren stepped forward, blade on his left, body squared. "Who sent you?"

The figure tilted its head, then pointed at Lady Lethren.

She drew herself up, shoulders back, cloak falling open to reveal a bandolier of glass vials. "Speak."

The figure did, at last, voice a dry rattle like salt poured slow onto stone. "The pass is compromised. Runners dead. They watch the switchback."

"How many?" Soren asked.

The figure considered, then held up two fingers.

Kale snorted. "Just two?"

But the figure shook its head, then held up both hands, ten fingers, then flashed them again, then again. At least thirty, Soren calculated. Maybe more.

The figure then crossed arms, pointed at Lady Lethren, and mimed "move fast" with a jerk of the chin.

"Who are you?" Soren asked, because it felt like the script required it.

The figure shrugged, which Soren respected.

It turned to leave, but paused at the fire, reached down, and in a smooth, practiced motion scooped up a handful of ash. It poured it into a pouch at its belt, then vanished into the dark.

No one said anything for a long time.

Liane was first to break it: "What if we just… didn't do this?"

Seren: "Then they'd send someone else. Or worse, they'd send more."

Kale grinned, teeth sharp in the light. "I say we go through. Worth it just to see if they're exaggerating."

Lady Lethren looked at Soren, weighing him. "Well?"

He thought through the map, the odds, the history of every test he'd ever seen run at Aetherion.

"We go," he said. "But we don't follow the corridor."

Seren smiled, just a little. "Classic Vale."

They packed up, doused the fire, and pressed east, detouring off the main route at the first gully. The ground was softer, but the trees offered cover, and Soren trusted the wild more than he trusted the road.

For three hours, nothing but the soft plod of boots and the rhythmic click of Kale's tongue as he counted the seconds.

At dawn, they crested a rise and saw the pass, a knife-cut in the mountain, barely wide enough for two to cross at once. The old route was barricaded, and Soren could see figures moving along it, each with the rigid posture of people paid to stand in place for days at a stretch. Not bandits, then. Professionals.

He motioned for the squad to hold. Scanned the field for a way around. There was none, unless you wanted to try the loose shale on the far slope. He considered it. If they went now, before the sun caught them, they might have time to get over and down, even if the risk was a broken leg or worse.

He didn't need to explain the logic. The twins picked up fast, then Jannek, then Seren, then even Kale, who for all his jokes didn't want to die in a corridor.

They set out, crawling the loose rock, boots and fingers scraping for any hold. Soren went first, breaking the path and noting every patch of scree that looked like it would collapse under weight. The air tasted of old iron, and the wind made the slope whistle.

At the midpoint, a rock gave way under Liane, and she slid, arms pinwheeling. Soren caught her ankle, braced against the hill, and anchored her until she could right herself. She looked at him, face close enough for him to smell the salt of fear. He let go when she was stable, and neither spoke of it.

They crested the ridge on hands and knees. From here, the pass was visible below—so was the squad of mercs stationed at the bottleneck, every one of them facing the route.

Lady Lethren whispered, "We need to get to the far trail before they double back."

Soren checked the squad, counted heads, then pointed left. They would skirt the top and loop down, timing the descent to the shift change he guessed would happen at midday.

They moved, slow and on their bellies, the world reduced to rock and the scrape of breath and the awareness, always, of exposure.

Halfway down, they heard the shot, snap of a crossbow, then a thud. Soren whipped his head: Jannek had gone still, a length of bolt protruding from his thigh. Not fatal, but bad. He told himself it was not fatal. Jannek's face locked in a grimace, but he jammed his own belt above the wound and kept crawling.

The squad compressed, Soren and Seren to either side of Jannek, the twins pulling ahead, Kale ghosting at the rear. The bolts came in pairs, one every minute, always aimed to wound, not kill.

"We're being herded," Seren said, and Soren knew she was right.

He let the world shrink to the next handhold, the next yard. At the bottom of the slope, they crashed through the brush and found themselves inches from the far trail, the pass behind them now ringing with the shouts of the mercs.

Kale helped Jannek up, and they limped at a dead run across the last span of open ground. The shadows of the trees swallowed them, and for the first time since the city walls, Soren felt the heart in his chest beating for something other than the next step.

They did not stop for a long time.

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