Mouse sat in a small wooden chair by the window of the solar as the morning light danced across the floor, the warmth of the sun on her back a reminder that it would soon be time to go. For three nights they had remained at Hallovie, and for three nights she had sat in the little wooden chair, watching the knight as he slept. She had seldom left his side, save to bathe and change her dress, preferring to remain nearby in the case that he might wake.

  Sure enough, the knight would rouse from time to time, his light brown eyes seeking Mouse and fixing her there for a time, before he would drift back into the realm of the unconscious. This had been enough to give Mouse cause for hope, to justify her staunch belief that the knight would return to himself in due course. His left shoulder had been ruined, the muscles torn and mutilated by the savage end of the spear, and it would likely never again bear the weight of a shield, but even now, there was some color returning to his complexion, and the surgeon had been generous in voicing his satisfaction that the knight had shown no sign of fever.

  Forty days it would take the blood to clean itself and the wound to heal, the surgeon had said, forty days the knight must lie in the small solar of Hallovie. And though this sounded an exceedingly long time to Mouse, who fretted over the knight’s being left alone where no one was known to him, she was assured that it would pass much more slowly for herself than it would for the man who, above all else, was in desperate want of rest. Even with such reassurances, however, it was with great reluctance that Mouse rose from her little wooden chair when the hour of their departure at last arrived. She crossed to the bed where the knight lay in repose, watching the movement of his eyes through the thin veil of his lids, before removing the ribbon from her sleeve and tying it around his wrist.

  “So that he will not think we have abandoned him,” she murmured quietly. And with a final silent goodbye, she left the warmth of the solar for the crisp morning air.

  As the small party rode out from the gates of Hallovie, Mouse cast a backward glance at the hilltop keep and could not help but feel a pang of guilt. She had asked the surgeon’s apprentice if he would not be so kind as to write to her in regard to Sir Hugo’s progress, but had been met with something of a derisive look and was advised to inquire elsewhere. The utmost members of the household not being within, Mouse had searched high and low until she found a maid who knew her letters well enough to compose a simple correspondence. She had thought to bribe the girl with the vial of tincture that had been bestowed upon her at Pothes Mar, but being unable to locate it, had settled upon her a jeweled hairpin instead.

  The rest of the caravan had gone ahead, pressing on through the protest and not stopping until they had arrived at Silkeborg, and so it was that Mouse was forced to go, as all the others, on horseback. But though she lamented this, trading a portion of her melancholy for self-pity, she found that she was coming to gain an unexpected sense of appreciation for the meditative nature of sitting on a horse while one rode across the landscape. Mouse had spent much of her time at the knight’s side reliving the attack and ruminating on the events that preceded it, as she did again now. She had examined every piece of evidence available to her, but no matter how many times she did, it all led to the same conclusion, namely, that it had been the work of Lord Ralist.

  The attack, it was clear to see, had been meditated, carefully planned from start to finish, from the flooded high road south of Pothes Mar to the obstructed byway east of Hallovie, and executed with a cold precision that reeked of the both the General’s strategic mind and his arrogance. It was vengeance, plain and simple, retribution for the Empress—for Mouse carrying away his son.

  There had been no violence, no real violence, leading up to the attack, and even in its wake, there were naught but a few scrapes among the laborers and the guard. But the damage inflicted by the act itself was another matter entirely; that was something that would bleed and boil until it ruptured, and whether or not the General realized it, he had assuredly brought war upon himself.

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  “Alright, Mouse?”

  Mouse turned toward the familiar voice to see Bo approaching on his red roan, managing a smile before returning her gaze to the horizon where the sun was cresting the Adderkops that stood faintly in the distance, the long range of peaks swathed in a haze of morning mist. She was too exhausted and too melancholic for conversation, but the guardsman did not seem to mind. He rode beside her in an easy kind of silence, a silence to which Mouse was slowly growing accustomed, before finally addressing her some minutes later.

  “You see that over there?” he asked, extending an arm to indicate a solitary peak rising to the north and east of where they rode now. “That’s Praeden Peak.”

  Mouse followed the line of his finger with her eyes.

  “Praeden Peak?” she echoed, squinting into the morning light. “I thought it was further south than that.” Praeden Peak was one of the tallest peaks in all of Aros, and even if Mouse had never seen it, she had certainly heard of it.

  The guardsman shook his head, kicking his horse to keep pace with Mouse.

  “You’re thinking of Praeden Peak, the castle,” he said. “But that there is the real Praeden Peak,” he gazed out across the fields, “south of the Faunus and west of the marshes.”

  Mouse nodded slowly, a murmur of interest escaping her lips, despite herself.

  “So why, then—”

  “Praeden Peak, the castle is called Praeden Peak because that’s exactly what you can see when you stand in the highest window of the northwest tower,” the guardsman said by way of explanation. “It was built just so by the fellow who commissioned it, and it’s something of a point of pride for them from what I hear.”

  “I see,” said Mouse, her eyes still fixed on the solitary mountain rising in the distance.

  “Now, Praeden Peak does have its own keep,” the guardsman continued, “but you’ll never guess what it’s called.”

  Mouse squeezed her eyes shut, trying to think of the least logical answer.

  “The Yar,” she answered.

  The guardsman threw his head back in laughter.

  “Close,” he said, “but no. It’s called the Bluff.”

  “The Bluff?” Mouse repeated, brushing a gnat from her sleeve. “Why the Bluff?”

  The guardsman grinned at her.

  “I thought you’d never ask.” From his seat in the saddle, he leaned toward Mouse, extending an arm this time to indicate the distant range of mountains that sprung up along the horizon.

  “Look,” he said, “that there’s the Adderkops, right? And there,” he indicated the solitary peak in the middle distance, “there’s Praeden Peak.” He waited for Mouse to give a nod of understanding. “Now, what do you notice about Praeden Peak?” he asked. “What’s different about it?”

  Mouse studied the horizon and shrugged her shoulders.

  “It’s lonely,” she said.

  The guardsman smiled at her.

  “Exactly,” he said. “But here’s the thing: you wouldn’t necessarily know that if you were coming from the other way.”

  Mouse nodded slowly.

  “I see,” she said, somewhat unconvincingly.

  “Say you’re coming through the mountains by way of Ingrid’s Vale,” Bo continued eagerly, his grey eyes catching the light as he spoke, “and you’re trying not to draw attention to yourself. Once you cleared the range, you’d likely think you were home-free, right? As far as you can tell, there’s nothing around for miles in any direction and you’ve escaped the notice of the holds that flank the Adderkops.”

  “Certainly,” Mouse agreed.

  “But you’d be wrong,” the guardsman, his grey eyes bright with excitement, “because tucked just around that mountain there,” he nodded toward Praedon Peak, “is the Bluff, and they’d see you coming a mile away.”

  “Ah,” Mouse said, understanding finally dawning on her. “It’s a bluff,” she said, “a trick. You can’t tell it isn’t part of the Adderkops until you’re already through.”

  She looked at the guardsman who returned her smile and felt a kind of warmth spread over her, a sense of gratitude for the distraction he had devised. How the Empress had gone from someone as sour as Johannes to someone as sweet as Bo, she did not understand.

  “Now, Ingrid’s Vale,” the guardsman said, “there’s another interesting one. Most people think it’s named for the Han princess, but it actually got its name by accident, a miscommunication, much like how Astice Ford became Asta’s Ford, even though the woman likely never even heard of the Gheny.”

  Mouse cocked her head in interest, shielding her eyes from the sun that glinted off the guardsman’s mail.

  “Oh?” she said. “What should it have been called then?”

  The guardsman gave his horse another firm kick.

  “If memory serves,” he said, “used to be it was called Yndis Vale.”