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A drip sounded, and another.

Wilder searched the snow at his boots, spotting a tiny patch of red, so stark against the white. Blood. Human blood.

His, he realised.

The sleeve of his shirt was wet with it. Turning his back to Thea, who was still in the clearing with the monster corpses, he looked down at his forearm. There, beneath the tattered leather of his vambrace and the torn fabric of his shirt, was a thin, bloody slash through his skin.

The cut wasn’t deep. Wilder couldn’t even feel it, but what caused him to falter was the translucent film of something else around its edges.

Venom.

‘What’s the hold-up?’ Thea called. ‘Did you see anything?’

Wilder wrenched his sleeve back down and wiped away the smear of blood. ‘There was someone watching,’ he told her, returning to the clearing. ‘But they’re long gone.’

‘Spies?’ Thea asked, frowning into the forest.

‘Perhaps,’ he replied. ‘They’re not our concern now, though.’

Thea sheathed her blades. ‘Onwards, then?’

Wilder whistled for Biscuit, who came trotting through the trees, Thea’s mare close behind. ‘Onwards.’

The towering mountains of Aveum loomed close now, bearing down on them in the fading light just as the weight of the impending Great Rite did.

Wilder could feel the faint edge of the venom in his system, but he shoved the thought aside. His priority was Thea and getting her to where she needed to be. He could deal with the consequences of the arachne scratch later.

He and his apprentice wove through the barren trees, the incline perilously steep through snow and ice. The air was getting colder by the second, clouding before their faces, and Wilder was beginning to lose feeling in his fingertips.

‘Wilder?’ Thea’s voice cut through the quiet.

‘What is it?’

‘We’re nearly there.’

He had felt it too. He noted the familiarity as they approached the foot of the mountains, his heart lurching, threatening to come up into his throat. Torj’s words echoed in his mind.

Be strong for her.

So he simply nodded. ‘Good.’

All too soon, the trees around them thinned, revealing the foot of a formidable mountain. The towering behemoth reached skyward, crowned by a jagged peak, wreathed in a swirling tempest of fog and snow.

The very air they breathed sang with an otherworldly chill, biting at their lungs as they inhaled. To the left of the rocky base was one of the roads to Tver… The road Wilder and Talemir had taken after he’d emerged from his Great Rite ordeal, to claim his Tverrian stallion. To the right, the road was swallowed by more forest, a sea of ancient pines burdened with the weight of endless winter.

Thea drew them to a stop and dismounted, staring up at the mountain before her, taking in its sharp rocks and the eerie trees, their gnarled branches like bony fingers grasping for something they’d never have.

‘It’s calling me,’ she murmured in wonder, her hands falling from her mare’s bridle.

Wilder followed her gaze, his chest aching, his more primal instincts warring inside him. Part of him wanted to snatch Thea up and whisk her away from this place, but he beat those feelings back.

‘I go no further,’ he told her instead.

The mountain had its own presence, etched by history and time, harbouring secrets that would never come to light. Even now, it whispered to him as though it knew him, recognised him from long ago and had known he would return. So many fates had been determined in the depths of its valleys, in its dark crevices, atop its razor-edged peak.

But it was the fate of only one that mattered most to him now.

Those celadon eyes locked with his.