Morning came late to the mountains. The gorge lay sealed beneath a rough quilt of stone, and a thin frost gathered along the toppled slabs as if the night had tried to bandage the wound. Smoke still drifted in the hollows. Every breath tasted faintly of dust and iron.
No one cheered. You don't cheer at a graveside, however large.
The yard moved in careful circles. Wolves in human skin carried stretchers. The fae worked with quiet hands, green light guttering and flaring from their palms as if it were the last of the oil in a nearly empty lamp. Men fetched water, blankets, bread. Someone righted a table because a table ought to be upright, even in the end of the world. Someone else hammered a bent nail flat simply to remember the sensation of cause and effect. Children were gathered and counted twice, then once more for luck.
Elara walked through it like smoke through rafters. The silver inside her had settled to a heavy coin under her ribs, warm and miserable. She had slept between one heartbeat and the next, seated on the step with her head against a post; when she opened her eyes the world had not improved. She washed the dust from her hands in a basin and found, beneath the brown, her own skin again. It didn't feel like a victory.
Garrett found her at the break in the palisade where the cliff face could be seen most clearly. He had a slate in one hand and a lump of charcoal in the other. He hated counting; it showed in the stiffness of his mouth.
"Numbers," he said, as if the word itself were distasteful. "Seventeen dead named and laid proper. Nine wolves, eight human. Three were turned yesterday; they'll live." He cleared his throat. "Two more won't keep their legs without rest. They'll be carried until the trail allows wheels."
Elara nodded. The numbers felt like stones placed, one by one, in the pockets of a coat. She didn't ask for the list. She already knew which name was missing from the living.
"Food?" she asked.
"Enough for a week if we chew properly," Garrett said. "Longer if the fae make a miracle of the mushrooms they keep promising us." He didn't try to smile. "We'll butcher two ferals from before the fall for the dogs. Not for us."
"Water?"
"Spring still runs." He tipped his chin towards the narrow rill that trickled along the village's rear wall. "Turns out mountains are good at being what they are."
Riven stood with Amber and Ailis on the northeast bank, looking down at the new slope of stone that had erased the black mouth. His golden aura had banked to an ember's glow. He looked like a man who had used up the part of himself that loved language, and was content for now to stand in weather and think with his spine.
When he turned, the yard hushed. He didn't raise his voice; the hush followed him like a cloak. "We name our dead at noon," he said. "Before the sun tips over. We build the cairn against the wall. All who can stand will stand. All who can lift will lift. All who can speak will speak."
It was not command and not request. It was the shape of the day.
Torvee approached, Jonah tucked under her arm like a parcel that had decided to wriggle. The boy's face was blotched with sleep and stubbornness. "Do people stay where you put them, under the stones?" he asked in a small voice that tried to be brave. "Or do they go… somewhere else?"
Torvee's mouth worked once. She looked at Elara, then at Riven. The Alpha's expression did not change, but his eyes softened, a fraction. Torvee squatted so Jonah's gaze didn't have to climb. "Both," she said. "Their bodies stay so we can find them again when we need to remember. The rest of them goes on. That's what the stories are for—so the rest of them knows the way."
Jonah thought about this, the cogs turning behind his eyes. "When I'm a snake," he said, very matter-of-fact, "I'll coil round the stones so they're warm."
"That would be kind," Torvee said, and kissed his hair.
Kara and Elise were up on the platform, looking along the line where old rope had been re-strung and new stakes driven. Kara's hands were steady again. "The cliff looks… final," she said, squinting. "Like a full stop."
Elise's mouth tilted. "Or like a page torn out of a book."
Clint came past with a crate of tins and a face set at a carefully neutral angle. His shirt had been washed and not dried, so he looked damp and indignant. "Anyone fancied a sensible job, now's the time," he grunted. "I've got exactly two tins labelled 'peaches' and if they turn out to be beetroot I will bite the man who wrote that."
"Save your teeth," Kara said. "You may need them."
"Peaches," Jonah breathed, as if the word were a spell said by a wizard with jam on his beard.
"Later," Torvee told him, in the tone of a woman who had survived on later for years.
Elara wandered without choosing where, and the yard arranged itself around her path. People glanced up when she passed. Some straightened. A few reached out and brushed her sleeve as if the fabric had become a talisman overnight. She wanted to tell them not to. She wanted to tell them she could not carry any more names. Instead she kept moving, because stopping felt like admitting something she had not yet learned to say.
A hand touched her forearm. The healer—soft-faced, steel-spined—pressed a folded strip of linen into Elara's palm. "For your hands," she said. "You're leaking."
Elara glanced down. The cuts from the digging had reopened, lines of red bright against the dirt. "I didn't notice," she said.
"You won't," the healer replied. "Until you do, and then you'll fall on your face. I'll have you on your feet at noon, or I'll thump you there."
Elara smiled—small, crooked. "You sound like my father."
The healer's eyes warmed. "Good. Then you'll listen."
By late morning the cairn had grown. Stones were chosen and carried, not any old rock but ones that suited the hand and the memory. Names were spoken aloud before the first stone was laid for each: wolves with their human names, humans with both—the name they'd been born to and the one they'd earned here, beneath these walls. The fae laid herb sprigs between layers: rosemary and something sharp from the high shelves that stung the nose. It smelt like a clean blade.
Riven stood at the head. He did not read. He did not intone. He named. Each syllable had the weight of a thing placed on a shelf where it belonged. The ninth wolf. The eighth human. The boy who had wanted to learn the names of constellations. The woman who had sworn at the wind and won.
When he reached Caleb's name, the air changed. It wasn't louder or quieter; it simply became more itself, as if everything had decided to be present at once.
Elara stepped forward. She was clean, as far as water and time permitted, and her hair had been pulled back with a strip of cloth. Her hands were bandaged. The bandages were already grubby. She placed a flat slate of stone at the topmost lip, found its balance, and left her fingers there for a breath too long. When she spoke, her voice was not strong, but it was steady enough to take weight.
"Caleb," she said. "You were always annoying when I needed you to be sensible. Thank you for it. You made me laugh when laughter didn't make sense, and you stood between me and stupid, and when I shouted you folded your arms and said 'are you finished'. I'm not. But you are. I hate it." She swallowed. "You were here, and then you weren't. We will carry the bit that stayed."
She stepped back. The world did not collapse under her feet. It felt like it might; it didn't. Torvee squeezed her shoulder hard enough to bruise. Luke blinked and blinked and made a face like a lad trying not to sneeze. Jonah slid a small, round stone out of his pocket—saved for skipping, by the look of it—and tucked it between the larger rocks with the fierce care of a boy giving away a treasure to prove a point to himself.
Garrett added his own stone with a grunt that might have been prayer dressed as complaint. Amber rested two fingers against the cairn briefly—as if taking a pulse—and then stepped aside. Ailis lifted her palms and breathed; a breath of wind came down off the wall and settled, smoothing a thread of hair off Elara's forehead in a gesture that felt, impossibly, like gentleness.
When it was done, the yard exhaled. The cairn stood waist-high and purposeful, its face a patchwork of colours—the iron-brown of old stone, the grey-green of lichen, the pale slate Elara had chosen. Someone stuck a bit of broken spear upright at the base because it felt right for a place where weapons finally had nothing left to do.
Riven looked to Garrett. "We move," he said, the word not hurried, simply true. "Not far, not fast. But we move. The gorge is closed, but the world still has teeth. We take those who can walk to the high village. We make a camp there and build walls that are not made of our own bodies. Those who cannot walk we carry. We go before dusk."
There were no arguments. The business of leaving began with the old, familiar efficiency of people who had already done it too many times. Packs were filled, water skins corked, blankets rolled. The three men Riven had turned the night before were still grey-faced, but there was colour in their lips and hunger in their eyes, which in wolves is a kind of health. One of them bowed awkwardly to Elara as she passed, the movement halfway between thanks and oath. "Luna," he said, almost under his breath, as if testing how the word would feel in his mouth if it became a habit.
Elara winced at the title, then let it sit. Pushing it away only seemed to make people hold it out to her more firmly, like a cloak you couldn't pretend wasn't warm. "Elara," she said gently. "For now."
He nodded, relief flickering over his face. For now was something people could live inside.
Caleb's place at the edge of the yard remained empty and obvious. Elara found herself looking at it as she tied her bedroll, as she checked the latch on her knife, as she fetched Jonah another mouthful of water because he had the sense to ask nicely. The empty place did not fill. That, she thought, would take a long time, and when it did it would not be because anyone decided.
Riven crossed to her when the last of the bundles had been roped to a litter and the last goat coaxed into remembering it had legs. He did not touch her. He stood where she could see him without having to look up.
"We train at the village," he said. "Today we walk. Tomorrow we teach your voice how not to break the person it belongs to." A ghost of a smile creased one corner of his mouth. "And we teach the others to be what they are."
"Torvee and the elder will take the shifters," Elara said, grateful to put shape around hours that would otherwise feel like carrying an armful of knives. "Kara, Elise, Clint. Jonah—if he's allowed."
"Jonah will be allowed to breathe and blink," Torvee called from three paces away, ears apparently tuned to the frequency of her own name. "Everything else we'll negotiate once he stops trying to be taller than his shadow."
Jonah scowled up at her and then at Elara. "I am taller than my shadow," he said, illogically offended. "At noon."
"At noon we'll measure," Torvee replied, not missing a beat. "With a stick."
A ripple of soft laughter moved through the nearest half-dozen people. It broke nothing and mended a little.
Amber approached with a satchel that clinked—whetstones, spare fletchings, things you only forgot once. "We'll need sentries on the high approach," she said, business-like. "I'll take first watch when we set camp. Garrett, you've got the strength to drag logs into a barricade; there's a shelf that will do for a gate."
Garrett grunted assent. "Aye. And we'll put a bell on it. Something that doesn't require a man to be awake to swear at it."
Ailis eyed the sky. "Weather holds for a day," she said. "After that, you'll be grateful for cloaks."
"Elara." Riven's voice again, softer. When she met his gaze the gold in his eyes was less molten, more sunrise. "You did not fail him."
Her throat tightened. "I didn't save him either."
"No," he agreed. "You didn't. That is the trouble with being alive." He tipped his head a fraction towards the cairn. "We carry the cost because we must. And then we carry on."
She wanted to argue with the first part and could not, and wanted to fight the second and knew he was right. "I don't know if I can make my voice do anything useful on purpose," she admitted. "Last night it… went. That's all."
"That is how it begins," he said. "It is also how you break men you don't want broken. We'll find the middle. It's what I'm for."
A small, embarrassed cough behind them. Luke, rubbing the back of his neck as if he'd done something wrong with it and hoped no one had noticed. "I, um. I told the pups in the den about Caleb," he said. "The little ones. They asked if he's in the stones or the moon. I said both. Was that—" He flapped a hand, mortified.
"That was right," Elara said, and the truth of it surprised her by not hurting. "Thank you."
Luke nodded sharply, relieved to have survived the test he'd invented for himself, and bolted before she could be kind to him again.
The line formed in the yard. Not neat—lines aren't, when they're made of the very young and the very old and the hurt—but purposeful. The three newly turned fell in with two older wolves who took their measure in two glances and moved half a step to shield them without making a map of it. The fae took the places they always took, at the edges where trouble crept, where they could see and be seen.
Elara lingered at the cairn for a heartbeat longer. She pressed the flat of her palm to the slate she had chosen, feeling the morning's thin warmth in it. "I'll come back," she said under her breath. Promise, threat, prayer—she didn't know which. Perhaps all three. The stone did not answer. It didn't need to.
"Time," Riven called, and the word set the line in motion.
They went out through the sally gate and turned along the narrow track that climbed towards the high village, boots and paws and the wobbling wheels of a single battered handcart sounding like a new sort of weather. The sealed gorge fell behind them, a scar that would show on any map they made. The wind came down from the peaks with a taste of snow in it, not yet, soon.
Elara walked at the front with Riven, Torvee at her shoulder, Jonah between them with his hand tucked into Torvee's so he could pretend he wasn't holding anyone's. Luke ghosted ahead and back, happy when his feet were moving. Garrett's rolling stride made the cart complain in a rhythm that would eventually be a song whether it wanted to or not. Amber's eyes caught everything; twice she warned them of loose shale before it remembered to give way.
They did not speak Caleb's name as they walked. There would be time for speaking and time for silence, and if the silence held him more gently just now, that was mercy.
At the first crest they paused, because men pause at crests. The valley opened, a spill of green and grey and the hint of far water. Higher up, the ribs of the mountain showed through like an animal's side. The place where they were going wasn't visible yet. It didn't matter. They knew the way.
Riven lifted his chin and tasted the air the way wolves do when they hope it has good news. "By sundown," he said. "If we don't dawdle."
"We never dawdle," Garrett muttered, rolling the cart with a noise of long-suffering wheels.
"You dawdle," Amber said. "You call it reconnaissance."
"Reckon I recall that word," Clint said amiably, shouldering his pack. "Means 'have a little sit-down where no one can see'."
A fragile, entirely human laughter went up in three places and died down again, not embarrassed, simply finished with its job.
Elara glanced back once. The cairn was a thumbprint against the wall now, a small deliberate shape in a landscape that had been trying to forget people existed for a very long time. She put her hand briefly to her chest where the coin of silver lay. The weight did not lessen. It moved with her.
"Tomorrow," Riven said softly, without looking at her, "we start. Your voice. Their shifts. All of it."
"Tomorrow," she said, and made it a promise.
They walked on into the thin light, away from the sealed mouth and the ash of victory, carrying what they had saved and what they had lost, and the mountain—for the moment—allowed it.