Chapter 1
“Get behind me, Aveline. Now.” Garrick did not look back as the crossbow bolts struck the pine trunk beside his ear. The mercenary shoved her into the hollowed roots, his broad frame sealing the opening like an iron gate. Blood dripped down his leather vambrace, yet his focus remained entirely, terrifyingly fixed on the shadows between the trees. “As long as my lungs take air, nothing in Hollowmere touches you.”
Another iron quarrel slammed into the bark three inches above her scalp, showering her braided dark hair with fragrant pine splinters.
Aveline pressed her spine against the damp hollow of the elder pine, her breath catching in her throat like jagged glass. Through the gap in the twisted roots, she could see only the churning gray mists of Hollowmere and the obsidian silhouettes of the black-cloaked trackers closing their circle.
Garrick didn't flinch. He didn't even blink.
He stood fully upright, broad shoulders squaring against the storm of steel, offering his own flesh as a living barricade between her and the iron-tipped death whistling through the canopy.
"Garrick, get down!" she pleaded, reaching out to snag the hem of his leather duster. "They’re using heavy arbalests—they'll punch straight through your plate!"
He did not heed her. He never did when blood was in the air.
A heavy bolt hissed through the fog, tearing through the meat of his left shoulder with a wet, sickening thud. The sheer kinetic force would have driven an ordinary man to his knees, or spun him around in agony. Garrick merely grunted—a low, rhythmic expulsion of air that sounded less like pain and more like a forge bellows stoking an ember.
He reached up with a gloved hand, snapped the ash-wood shaft clean at the iron head without breaking his stance, and discarded the splintered wood into the rotting leaves.
For a terrifying, fractional second, as he half-turned toward her, Aveline saw his eyes.
They were not the sharp, cunning hazel eyes of the most lethal sword-for-hire in the border kingdoms. For one heartbeat, the pupils were wide, unfocused pools of slate-gray, swimming behind a thin, milky film like ice skimmed across still water. It was the face of a man trapped beneath a frozen lake, looking up at the sky.
Then the veil vanished. His gaze locked onto hers, burning with a ferocious, fanatical intensity that made the air in her chest turn to ash.
"Stay," he commanded. The word vibrated in her ribs. "Do not show yourself to them. Keep your wards asleep."
Before she could speak, Garrick surged forward.
He was massive—a scarred mountain of muscle honed by a decade of border skirmishes and slaughter—yet he moved with the sickening, fluid grace of a winter wolf. His twin broadswords cleared their sheaths with a synchronized shriek of cold steel.
The lead tracker burst through the fern thicket, brandishing a serrated broadhead spear. Garrick didn't bother parrying. He stepped straight into the reach, letting the spear tip score a crimson furrow along his ribs, and cleaved the man from collarbone to sternum in a single, devastating stroke.
Blood misted the silver fog. A second tracker fired from behind an ancient mossy boulder; the quarrel buried itself deep into Garrick’s left bicep.
Garrick didn't even look at the wound.
He closed the distance in two lunging strides, his off-hand blade catching the cross-bowman across the throat before the man could draw his dagger. A third man turned to flee, shouting a panicked retreat into the mist, but Garrick hurled his primary sword with unerring, mechanical precision. The heavy pommel and blade struck true, pinning the runner through the spine to an oak trunk forty yards away.
Silence fell over the clearing, thick and suffocating, broken only by the dripping of pine needles and the harsh, ragged rasp of Aveline’s breathing.
Garrick stood among the three corpses. Steam rose from his blood-slicked armor in the biting mountain air.
"Garrick..." Aveline’s voice trembled as she crawled out from the root hollow, her knees sinking into the damp peat.
At the sound of her voice, his feral tension vanished instantly. The murderous monster she had just watched butchering three armed men transformed with unnerving swiftness into a loyal hound. He retrieved his lodged sword with a single jerk, wiped the steel on the dead tracker’s tunic, and crossed the clearing toward her.
He dropped to one knee before her, heedless of the freezing mud soaking through his trousers. He was shivering slightly, but his gaze traveled over her body with desperate, frantic urgency, searching every inch of her pale skin for a scratch, a bruise, a mark.
"Did they touch you?" his voice rasped, rough as grindstone. "Tell me. Aveline, look at me. Did they strike you?"
"No," she breathed, her throat constricting with a guilt so profound it felt like swallowing crushed embers. "No, Garrick. I’m whole. But you—Gods above, look at what they did to you."
The iron bolt head was still lodged deep beneath his collarbone, the surrounding leather soaked in dark, viscous arterial crimson. Another wound bled freely down his left arm, and his side was painted in red.
"Flesh wounds," he dismissed instantly, not even glancing at the iron protruding from his shoulder. His breath smelled of bitter camp coffee and the metallic tang of blood. He reached up, his leather gauntlet—stained with the gore of their pursuers—hovering an inch from her cheek, hesitating, as though he feared his rough hands might fracture porcelain. "You are pale. Your heart is racing. We must move. The hunting horns will sound again before twilight."
"You cannot run with an iron bolt in your shoulder, you idiot," she said, her voice cracking with a mixture of exasperation and sharp, agonizing tenderness. "It will work deeper into your chest with every stride. We need shelter. Now."
He nodded once, with that same strange, absolute subservience that sent icy shivers down her spine. "Whatever you command."
He stood, swaying only slightly, and extended his uninjured arm to haul her to her feet.
***
They found refuge two leagues north, within the sunken belly of a long-abandoned stone lime-kiln swallowed by brier vines and ancient brambles. The stone walls were thick enough to mask the scent of their blood from the tracking beasts, and the narrow chimney vent allowed what little heat they generated to dissipate into the cold canopy.
Aveline set her satchel upon a flat stone and immediately went to work.
There was no light save for the dull, slate-colored twilight filtering through the overgrown opening. She couldn't risk a fire—not in Hollowmere, where the Imperial Inquisitors possessed hounds that could sniff a curl of smoke from three ridgelines away.
"Sit," she told him.
Garrick sat upon a fallen slab of limestone without a word of protest. His jaw was clenched tight, beads of sweat breaking out across his forehead despite the frost clinging to the stone around them. The adrenaline was finally wearing off, leaving behind the gray, hollow exhaustion of severe blood loss.
"Take off the cuirass," she instructed, her fingers already unbuckling the frozen leather straps across his chest.
He didn't move to help her until she explicitly pulled at a stubborn buckle; then, his fingers moved mechanically, undoing the clasps with precise, jerky motions. When she peeled away the boiled leather and the shredded linen undertunic, she couldn't suppress a sharp intake of breath.
