The attack came three nights later.

  They had pushed hard, covering forty miles of desolate scrubland. The landscape had changed from the rolling hills of the capital to the flat, grey expanse of the Northern Reach. The trees were becoming sharper, darker—pines replacing the oaks. The wind carried a new scent: resin and old snow.

  It was the hour of the dead—that deepest part of the night before dawn when the blood runs slow and the spirit is weak.

  Casimir was awake. He was taking the third watch, having relieved Silas. He sat on a rock on the perimeter, his sword across his knees, watching the mist curl around the sleeping forms of his men.

  He was tired. His body ached in places he didn't know existed. But his mind was racing. He was counting supplies, calculating rations, and running scenarios for the defense of a village he had never seen.

  Six barrels of oil. Three crates of powder. Eleven men.

  It’s not enough.

  A twig snapped.

  It wasn't the wind. The wind rustled; it didn't snap.

  Casimir stood up slowly. He didn't shout. He didn't panic. He reached down and picked up a stone, tossing it at the sleeping form of Kaelen. The sergeant woke instantly, his hand going to his dagger.

  Casimir put a finger to his lips and pointed to the darkness beyond the horses.

  The horses were restless, stamping and rolling their eyes, their ears pinned back.

  Then, Casimir saw them.

  Eyes. Yellow, reflective pairs of eyes floating in the gloom like suspended lanterns. One pair. Three. Seven.

  Wolves.

  But not the scavengers of the south. These were northern timber wolves—massive, gaunt beasts with shoulders like bulls and hunger in their gait. They weren't circling; they were advancing.

  "Up!" Casimir roared, kicking the fire to send a shower of sparks flying into the dark. "To arms! Protect the horses!"

  The camp erupted.

  A grey blur launched itself from the shadows, aiming for the throat of one of the draft horses.

  Thwack.

  An arrow took the wolf in mid-leap, burying itself in the beast's shoulder. It yelped, crashed into the dirt, and thrashed.

  Casimir looked to his left. Merrick was standing there, half-naked in the freezing cold. His hands were shaking violently—the twitch that defined him—but the moment he drew the bowstring back to his ear, the shaking stopped. He was a statue of focus. He loosed another arrow. Thwack. Another wolf went down.

  "Shields!" Kaelen bellowed. "Form on the wagon!"

  Boras and Kowalski stepped forward. They didn't have shields, but Kowalski held a heavy iron pry-bar from the wagon, and Boras wielded his warhammer.

  Three wolves charged the line, jaws snapping.

  Kowalski didn't flinch. He swung the pry-bar like a smith’s hammer, putting his hips into the blow. There was a sickening crunch of bone, and a wolf went flying, its spine shattered.

  "Hold the line!" Casimir shouted, drawing his sword. "Don't chase them! Stay in the light!"

  He saw the tactical layout instantly. The fire was their wall. The wagon was their castle. The wolves were trying to separate them.

  "The flank!" Roza’s voice cut through the chaos.

  Casimir turned. Two wolves had circled around, bypassing the heavy hitters to get to the undefended rear where the horses were tied.

  Casimir didn't think. He sprinted.

  The first wolf lunged at him, a blur of teeth and fur. Casimir dropped his shoulder, taking the impact on his padded gambeson. The force knocked the wind out of him, the jaws clamping onto his forearm. The teeth sank through the leather, finding skin.

  Casimir grunted, ignoring the pain. He drove his sword down, burying it in the beast's neck. Hot blood sprayed across his face.

  The second wolf was on him before he could free his blade. It knocked him backward into the mud. Snapping jaws filled his vision, drool dripping onto his cheek.

  Click. Twang.

  A crossbow bolt took the wolf through the eye.

  The beast collapsed on top of him, dead weight.

  Casimir shoved the carcass off and scrambled up, gasping for air. Roza stood by the wagon, calmly reloading her hand-crossbow. She nodded to him once—a professional acknowledgment.

  "Clear!" Kaelen shouted.

  The remaining wolves, seeing their packmates slaughtered and the wall of steel holding firm, turned and melted back into the dark.

  The silence returned, heavier than before.

  "Casualties?" Casimir breathless, wiping wolf blood from his eyes. He checked his arm. The leather was shredded, and blood was welling up, but the bone was intact.

  "Horses are spooked, but whole," Kowalski grunted, leaning on his pry-bar. He was panting, steam rising from his massive shoulders.

  "Davin took a bite to the leg," Kaelen reported. "But the boots held. He’s just bruised."

  Casimir looked at his men. They were panting, bleeding, and freezing... but they were alive.

  Merrick was shaking again, dropping his bow, his adrenaline fading. But Boras clapped him on the shoulder, grinning. Kowalski was wiping gore from his iron bar with a rag.

  They weren't useless. They were rusty, they were broken, but when the metal hit the meat, they held the line. They fought with the desperate coordination of men who knew that alone meant dead.

  "Good work," Casimir said, his voice rough. He sheathed his sword. "Krol, get the fire built up. If they come back, I want them to see us waiting."

  He walked over to Roza. She was retrieving her bolt from the wolf's skull.

  "Nice shot," Casimir said.

  "It was a large target," she replied, wiping the bolt clean on the wolf's fur. "And you made for excellent bait, my Lord."

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  "Next time," Casimir said, clutching his bleeding arm, "warn me before you use me as a lure."

  "Noted."

  He sat down on a log, rolling up his sleeve. The bite was ugly—four puncture wounds, bleeding sluggishly.

  "Let me see," Krol said, appearing with a bottle of harsh grain alcohol and a clean rag. "This is going to sting, my Lord."

  "Do it," Casimir said through gritted teeth.

  Krol poured the alcohol. Casimir hissed, his vision whiting out for a second. As the cook bandaged the arm with practiced efficiency, Casimir looked around the camp.

  The men weren't looking at him with suspicion anymore. They weren't looking at him with love, either. But they were looking at him. He had bled. He had fought. And he had held the line with them.

  The sun rose on a different company.

  The lethargy of the previous days was gone. The camp, usually a place of shivering silence and miserable groans, was alive with activity.

  Krol stood over the fire, stirring a massive iron pot that bubbled with a thick, dark stew. The smell of roasting meat—gamey, wild, and rich—filled the air, overpowering the scent of unwashed bodies.

  "Breakfast, my Lord," Krol said as Casimir approached, offering him a steaming bowl. "Wolf flank. Tough as old boots, but it’ll put fire in your belly."

  Casimir took the bowl. He took a bite. The meat was stringy and tasted faintly of iron, but it was hot, and it was fresh. After days of hardtack and dried beef, it tasted like a banquet.

  He looked around the circle.

  The men weren't just eating. They were working.

  Boras sat on a log, using a skinning knife to scrape the fat from a fresh wolf pelt. Beside him, Merrick was already sewing a piece of grey fur onto the shoulders of his tunic. Kowalski had fashioned a rough hood from the head of the largest wolf—the one he had killed with the pry-bar—and was currently wearing it, the dead eyes staring out from his forehead.

  They didn't look like the dregs of the army anymore. They looked feral. They looked like a pack.

  "Waste nothing," Kaelen said, walking up to Casimir. The sergeant had wrapped a strip of raw fur around his neck like a scarf. "The meat feeds us. The fur keeps us warm. And wearing the skin of the thing that tried to kill you... it’s good for morale."

  Casimir nodded, finishing the stew. "They fought well last night."

  "They fought because they had to," Kaelen corrected. "But they’re walking taller this morning. Killing something changes a man, my Lord. Even a broken one."

  Casimir looked at Roza. She was sitting by the wagon, cleaning her crossbow. She wasn't wearing a pelt, but she was eating the stew with the same pragmatic efficiency as the men.

  Casimir walked over to Boras. "Give me a knife."

  The earless man looked up, surprised, but handed over the blade. Casimir walked to the pile of remaining pelts. He cut a thick strip of grey fur from the flank of the wolf that had bitten him.

  He didn't sew it to his tunic. He tied it around his left forearm, covering the bandage where the teeth had sunk in. A trophy. A reminder.

  "Mount up!" Casimir ordered, his voice stronger than it had been in days. "We reach the Gate by noon!"

  The rolling hills and scrubland flattened out, giving way to a hard, grey tundra of frozen earth and jagged rock. The wind grew louder, a constant, howling presence that tore at their cloaks and stung their eyes.

  And then, they saw it.

  At first, Casimir thought it was a storm cloud. A massive, dark wall stretching across the horizon, blocking out the sun.

  But as they rode closer, the cloud became stone.

  The Frost-Gate.

  It was a monument to a paranoia ancient and terrified. Two mountain peaks, jagged and black like the broken teeth of a god, tore into the sky. And between them, spanning a canyon three miles wide, was a wall.

  It was immense. It was impossible.

  The wall rose five hundred feet into the air, a sheer cliff of hewn black granite that seemed to absorb the light. It was so high that it cast a permanent, freezing shadow over the valley floor for miles. The sun, which had been weak all morning, was completely extinguished as they rode into the shade of the Gate.

  The temperature dropped instantly. The air grew still and heavy.

  "By the Saints..." Davin whispered, reining his horse in. "I thought it was just a story."

  Casimir craned his neck back. He couldn't even see the top of the battlements. He could only see the small, flickering dots of signal fires burning along the rim, looking like distant stars.

  "It’s not a story," Kaelen said, his voice hushed. "It’s a lid. Keeping the hell of the North from spilling into the South."

  The road narrowed as it approached the base of the wall. There was a single opening—an archway large enough to march a legion through, closed by a set of timber doors reinforced with iron bands the thickness of a man’s torso.

  A small garrison town clung to the base of the wall like barnacles on a whale. Smoke rose from the chimneys, but there was no noise. No market shouts. No children playing. Just the wind howling through the canyon.

  Casimir rode to the front of the column. "Head high," he ordered his men. "We do not cower."

  But even as he said it, he felt the weight of the stone pressing down on him.

  They approached the gatehouse. A squad of guards stood there, wrapped in heavy furs, their faces hidden behind iron visors. They didn't carry spears; they carried heavy halberds and crossbows loaded with bolts the size of javelins.

  The Captain of the Gate stepped forward. He looked at Casimir’s banner—the Kovac crest—and then at the ragtag group of men wearing wolf skins.

  "State your business," the Captain said. His voice was muffled by the helm, flat and metallic.

  "Casimir Kovac," Casimir said, holding up the sealed parchment. "Steward of Blackwood. We are crossing."

  The Captain didn't move. He looked at the parchment, then up at the colossal wall, and finally back at Casimir.

  "Blackwood?" the Captain asked. "There's nothing in Blackwood but ghosts and ice."

  "Then I am the Lord of Ghosts," Casimir said. "Open the gate."

  The Captain hesitated. He looked at the men behind Casimir—at Kowalski in his wolf-head hood, at Krol with his hook, at Merrick twitching on his horse.

  "We don't open the main doors for anything less than a battalion," the Captain said. "Use the sally port. And Lord Kovac?"

  "Yes?"

  "Once you cross, the King’s Law ends. If you scream, we won't hear you. If you run back, we won't open the door."

  Casimir looked at the small, dark tunnel of the sally port. It looked like a throat waiting to swallow them.

  "There’s nothing to run back to," Casimir said with finality.

  He turned his horse, not toward the tunnel, but toward Roza.

  She sat on her mare, staring up at the massive wall. For the first time, her pen was still. The sheer scale of the Frost-Gate seemed to have silenced even the bureaucracy of the High Court.

  Casimir rode up to her, blocking her view of the gate.

  "Auditor," Casimir said. His voice was low, for her ears only.

  Roza tore her eyes away from the stone and looked at him.

  "You heard the Captain," Casimir said. "This isn't a ledger error you can fix later. Once we cross, you are a ghost to the Crown. This is a one-way trip."

  He gestured back toward the King's Road, the way they had come.

  "Turn around, Roza. Go back to Malbork. Tell Harlon we died in a drift three days out."

  Roza looked at the road south. It was a straight shot back to civilization. Back to warmth, wine, and safety. She could leave right now and no one would blame her.

  Then she looked at the sally port. And then she looked at Casimir.

  "I was sent to audit Blackwood, Lord Casimir," she said, her voice regaining its cool precision. "I cannot audit it from this side of the wall."

  "You’ll die," Casimir warned. "You aren't a soldier. You aren't a criminal. You don't have to do this."

  "Soldiers die. Criminals die," Roza said, adjusting her gloves. "And sometimes, Auditors die. But I don't leave tasks unfinished. And I certainly don't run from a job because the door is heavy."

  She spurred her horse forward, past him, toward the dark maw of the tunnel.

  "Besides," she called back over her shoulder, "someone has to count the bodies."

  Casimir watched her go. He shook his head, a small, grim smile touching his lips.

  He turned to his men. They were looking at the wall, their eyes wide, their breath coming in short gasps. The wolf meat and the victory of the night before seemed very small now against the scale of this barrier.

  "Kaelen," Casimir said. "Bring the wagon."

  He spurred his horse forward, into the shadow of the arch.

  The tunnel was long, damp, and freezing. The sound of the horses' hooves echoed like thunder. It felt like they were riding through the bowels of the earth.

  And then, they emerged.

  The light on the other side was different. It wasn't the gray of the south. It was a stark, blinding white.

  The wind hit them with the force of a physical blow. Ahead of them, the road vanished entirely, replaced by a vast, untamed wilderness of snow-covered pines and jagged ridges.

  They were through the Frost-Gate.

  Casimir stopped his horse and looked back. The massive doors of the sally port slammed shut behind them with a boom that shook the ground. The sound final, absolute.

  He looked forward.

  To his right, the tree line began—ancient, towering giants, their needles black against the white snow.

  The Whispering Pine-Barrens.

  "We’re here," Roza said, pulling her mare up beside him. She was shivering, but her pen was already in her hand, hovering over her ledger. "Day four. Crossed the Frost-Gate. Assets remaining: Eleven men. One wagon."

  "And one Lord," Casimir added, drawing his sword.

  He pointed it toward the trees.

  "Welcome to Blackwood."