The change did not come all at once. It was a slow, steady hardening of the world, as if the land itself was bracing for a perpetual winter.
The gentle, rolling hills grew steeper, their backs bone-white with exposed granite. The broad-leafed trees of the south began to thin, replaced by dense, dark stands of pine and fir that crowded the road, their scent saturating the cool air with a crisp, resinous bite. The most profound change was the air. It lost the last vestiges of the capital's mild dampness, becoming a sharp, clean blade that drew effortlessly into the lungs and carried the distant, clean scent of snow, even though none lay on the ground.
We were crossing an invisible, elemental threshold. The map in Kaelen's mind, and the one he'd shown Damien, had a line here. We were leaving the Empire's tender interior and entering the borderlands of the Northern Duchy.
