LAIKA

Stormscar Keep wore winter the way a warrior wore old scars—without complaint, without softness, without ever pretending it did not hurt.

The wind came down off the northern ridges in hard white sheets, found every crack in the stone, and worried banners until they snapped like whipcord. It drove needles of ice through the yard in sudden gusts. Men and women cursed it, laughed at it, spat into it. The wind did not care.

Laika Kerrick cared.

Not about the cold—she had been born into it and would die into it, if her mother had her way—but about being watched while she endured it.

She stood in the training yard with her hair bound tight at the nape of her neck, silver against the washed-out sky. Kerrick hair was a thing spoken of in Baerhold as if it were proof of blood and old luck. Men called it moon-sheen when they were trying to sound gentle. Women called it trouble. Laika’s mother called it an advertisement.

Laika called it inconvenient.

Across from her, Joren of some minor house she could never remember without effort rolled his shoulders as if he meant to fight the wind itself. He had a blunted sword in his hands, broad across the guard and heavy enough to satisfy boys who thought strength was the same thing as skill.

He grinned at her, showing teeth. “Ljosvorn med ther.”

It wasn’t Darkguard talk. It wasn’t secret. Everyone in Baerhold knew a few scraps of Skugramal, the old tongue, the kind of phrases you said because your grandmother said them, because your captain said them, because you said them the first time you held steel and wanted to feel older than your fear. You could spit it as a blessing, a challenge, a farewell. Before a fight, it meant good fortune—or at least a shared understanding of what waited for the unlucky.

Laika lifted both daggers in guard. “Myrkur tekur allt.”

Darkness takes all.

The watchers along the wall chuckled at that, because it was the right answer and because it sounded bold from a girl of seventeen who had never seen real battle. Laika let them chuckle. She didn’t fight for their approval.

Joren lifted his sword. “Yield, Laika,” he called loudly enough for the wall to hear. “Your father won’t thank you for cutting up another sparring partner.”

“My father won’t thank you for living,” Laika said, and stepped in.

Steel kissed steel. Not the ring of real blades—these were dulled for practice—but the sound still carried. Everything carried in Stormscar. Even whispers.

Laika moved like she was late for something.

That was the truth of her. Even standing still, she felt late.

Her left blade caught his sword and pushed, not to stop it but to angle it aside. Her right blade flicked up, quick as a wink, and tapped him on the wrist. A sting, nothing more. His grin faltered.

She didn’t let him reset.

Laika slid inside his reach, shoulder brushing his chest, and forced him to stumble. Not with strength—he had her there—but with timing. He tried to wrench his sword back into line. She was already past it.

The flat of her dagger smacked his ribs. Once. Twice. Three times, each in a different place, each hard enough to be felt through padding.

“Count them,” she said softly. “So you remember.”

He snarled and swung wide. The wind took the edge of it and made it clumsy. Laika stepped out of the arc, turned her hips, and drove the butt of her dagger into his forearm. His sword dipped. Her other blade slid up under his chin—not to cut, not with blunted steel, but to make the point.

She held him there.

From the wall, someone clapped once, sharp and approving.

Joren froze, breathing hard, cheeks red. Whether from cold or shame, Laika couldn’t say. She could feel his pulse through the slight tremor of his jaw. She could end it with a twist of wrist. She could embarrass him with a shove.

None of that was the point.

“Yield,” Laika said. She did not raise her voice. She didn’t need to.

He swallowed. “Yield,” he muttered.

Laika stepped back and lowered her blades. The watchers made a sound like a wave breaking—murmurs, a few laughs, a low rumble of approval. She pretended not to hear.

Her breath steamed. Snow clung to her lashes. The cold tried to bite through her gloves.

It didn’t matter. She had won. That was what mattered.

“In your keeping,” said a voice behind her.

Laika turned.

Her father had come down from the inner ward without fanfare, as he always did. Thrain Kerrick did not announce himself. He did not need to. The yard shifted around him like a stream around a stone.

He was a big man in the way mountains were big. Broad shoulders, thick wrists, a beard gone iron-gray at the edges, eyes the color of storm cloud. The wind tugged at his cloak; it did not move him.

Behind him walked her mother, Connie Kerrick, wrapped in fur and grace. Her hands were bare, as if the cold were beneath her.

Laika wiped her daggers on a cloth and slid them into their sheaths before she bowed. Not deep. Not submissive. Just enough.

“In your keeping,” Laika replied, because it was expected, because the words were older than she was and safer than truth.

Thrain’s gaze went to her hips, to the twin dagger hilts. His mouth tightened a fraction.

“You’re fast,” he said, which was what he said when he couldn’t say well done.

“Fast is alive,” Laika said.

“Fast is wind,” Thrain replied. “Wind changes.”

Laika bit back a retort. So do storms. So do rulers. So does everything, if you wait long enough.

Her mother’s eyes flicked toward the yard gate. “You have an audience.”

Laika followed the glance and felt her stomach tighten. Not at the soldiers and stablehands and kitchen boys, but at the two figures wrapped in better cloth—visitors, not of Stormscar—standing apart as if the cold were something they could purchase their way out of.

A man and a woman, both in the colors of another Keepline—deep green and bone-white—waiting beside the gate with the quiet confidence of people who had been allowed through it.

“They arrived this morning,” Connie murmured, as if she were commenting on weather.

Laika’s throat went dry. “Already?”

“They were on the road when our messenger reached them,” Connie said. “They were eager.”

Eager. Connie could turn any word into a blade when she wanted.

Thrain glanced toward the visitors and then back to Laika. “Wash. Change. You will greet them.”

Laika’s daggers felt suddenly heavier. “Now?”

“Now,” Thrain said. The stone in his voice allowed no argument.

Connie leaned close. Her breath smelled faintly of spruce oil. “Do not look like you are marching to execution. A good match is not a noose. It is a rope you can climb.”

Laika almost laughed. Connie made everything sound like a strategy. Even marriage.

“I don’t want—” Laika began.

Connie’s fingers tightened at Laika’s elbow—gentle, firm. “You want many things. You can want them and still do what you must.”

Thrain turned away first, because he always did. Connie followed at his side, head high, fur trailing like a banner.

Laika stood still until they had passed through the arch into the inner ward. Only then did she let out the breath she’d been holding.

“A rope you can climb,” she muttered.

From near the practice racks, a familiar voice said, “If you climb it, don’t look down.”

Laika turned her head without moving her feet.

Michael Kerrick leaned against a post, arms folded, the picture of bored patience. Two years younger than her, he was still growing into his bones, still a boy in the face if not the eyes. His hair was the same silver as hers. His smile was the same trouble, just worn with less caution.

“How long have you been there?” Laika asked.

“Long enough to see you humble poor Joren,” Michael said. “Again.”

“He shouldn’t bring a sword to a dagger fight,” Laika said.

“He shouldn’t fight you at all,” Michael replied. “He’s courting bruises, not you.”

Laika snorted, but her gaze flicked back toward the visitors. Connie’s rope.

Michael followed her look and made a sympathetic sound. “Ah.”

“Don’t,” Laika warned.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Michael lied.

Laika’s hands tightened around the cloth she’d used to wipe her blades. “They can’t just… show up.”

“They can,” Michael said. “They did.”

Laika glared at him. Michael raised both hands in mock surrender.

“I’ll be good,” he promised. Then, softer, “Are you going to meet them with daggers on your hips?”

“I’m going to meet them with my name,” Laika said. “That should be enough.”

“It never is,” Michael muttered, and for a moment he sounded older than fifteen.

Laika opened her mouth to answer—

—and then the yard changed.

Not with sound at first, but with a feeling. Like when a storm’s pressure drops and your bones know it before your eyes do. The soldiers along the wall shifted. The stablehands stopped what they were doing. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath for half a heartbeat.

Then came the horn.

Not the long ceremonial blast used for visitors or feast days, but a short urgent call from the outer gate. Two notes, a pause, then three—an old pattern meant to yank people into readiness.

Michael straightened. Laika’s daggers were suddenly alive against her hips.

“A runner,” Michael said.

They reached the yard gate as the inner ward doors swung open. Guards spilled into the corridor, half-armored, hands on spear shafts. Connie appeared at the head of them, fur thrown back, face hard. Thrain’s cloak followed like thunder.

Laika didn’t wait for permission. She never did when something new was happening.

They pushed through the arch into the outer ward.

The outer gate of Stormscar was a brutal thing of iron and oak and old stains. Beyond it, the road ran north as a thin gray line between snowdrifts, a line marked at intervals by beacon-posts—iron baskets on stone pedestals, each made to hold flame and fight the dark when night fell.

The beacons were not magic. They were oil and wick and iron, tended by men who smelled of soot and cold. The Darkguard claimed the beacons mattered. Most people in Stormscar treated that as a kind of inherited piety—something you respected the way you respected old prayers, without expecting them to change the world.

A man stumbled through the half-open gate and fell to his knees in the snow.

He wore a cloak so dark it drank the pale light. Frost crusted his shoulders. His boots left bloody prints. His face was raw, cheeks split by cold, lips cracked. In his hand he clutched a small iron lantern-hook, the kind used to carry oil and wick between posts. It shook like a live animal.

A gate guard spat into the snow. “Darkguard,” he muttered, not a compliment.

The man lifted his head, eyes wild, and rasped, “Ljosvorn med ther.”

No one froze at the words. Half the yard could have answered them in their sleep. The scarred woman with the broken nose—one of Stormscar’s older guards—answered by habit more than reverence.

“Myrkur tekur allt.”

The runner sagged as if the reply had been a rope thrown to him across a chasm.

Connie moved first. Not running—Connie never ran—but striding through the snow with purpose. She knelt beside him, ignoring the blood on his boots.

“In your keeping,” Connie said, and it sounded strangely kind from her. “Who are you?”

The man’s mouth worked. “Harek,” he managed. “Harek… of the line.”

Thrain stepped forward. His eyes were hard with irritation more than fear. “Which line?”

Harek’s gaze flicked past them toward the north road as if it might sprout teeth. “North,” he whispered. “The north posts. The last… the last burning.”

Laika felt her heartbeat quicken. Not dread—something sharper. A pull.

Thrain’s lips curled slightly. “And what tale are you bringing from your black road this time? A shadow with a name?”

Harek flinched. “My Keeper—”

“I am no Keeper,” Thrain snapped. “And you are no priest. Speak plain.”

Harek swallowed and tried to draw air into lungs that didn’t want it. “I saw it,” he croaked.

“Saw what?” Connie demanded.

Harek’s fingers tightened around the lantern-hook. “The bear.”

The yard made a sound all at once—like wind catching dry leaves. A few heads turned. Someone laughed, short and disbelieving. Someone else muttered a curse.

A bear was a story in Baerhold. A Kerrick story. Old songs and old warnings. People said the Kerricks had a bond with bears once, before the world grew smaller and safer and the stories grew dull at the edges. It had been years since anyone had seen even tracks in the snow.

Thrain’s expression did not change. If anything, it grew flatter. “No,” he said. “You saw a dark stump. A drifting cloak. A wolf.”

Harek shook his head violently, snow flying. “No. I saw it. It came out of the dark.”

“There is no ‘out of the dark,’” Thrain said, voice iron. “Not like your superstition songs. The Nightline is a prayer, not a place. For thousands of years nothing comes back from it because no one goes to it and returns. That is how stories work.”

The gate guards nodded at that, relieved to have the world make sense again.

Harek’s eyes darted, frantic. “Not the Nightline,” he rasped, clinging to words like he could make them true by force. “The black between the pines. Where the beacon light doesn’t reach. It stepped from it like it had been inside it.”

Thrain made a harsh sound that might have been a laugh. “Inside the dark,” he repeated. “And did the dark swallow you too, Harek, or did you run as soon as your courage failed?”

Harek’s shoulders hunched. “Yes,” he admitted, shame and terror tangled. “Yes, I ran. Because the flame—” His voice broke. “The flame flickered.”

Connie went still. “Flickered how?”

Harek’s throat bobbed. “Like something breathed on it. Like it was being… smothered.”

The yard quieted. Even the men who didn’t believe in Nightlines believed in wind and oil and the simple fact of fire dying.

Connie rose, fur sweeping snow. “Double the watch,” she ordered, sharp as a snapped rein. “All posts within sight of Stormscar—check oil, check wick, check iron. Now.”

The guards moved at once. It was easier to obey Connie than to argue with uncertainty.

Thrain’s jaw worked. “We are not going to indulge this,” he said low to Connie, as if the yard could not hear. “If the Darkguard want to frighten themselves, let them do it far from my walls.”

Connie’s eyes did not soften. “This is not indulgence. It is prudence.”

Thrain looked past her to the runner like he was looking at a cracked tool. “Bring him in,” he snapped. “Warm him. Feed him. And when his wits return, we’ll learn what he actually saw.”

Laika stepped forward. “If it’s real—”

Thrain’s gaze cut to her. “It is not.”

Laika held his eyes. “You don’t know that.”

“I know this Keep,” Thrain said. “I know these woods. I know what men say when they’ve spent too long chasing shadows and calling it duty. The Darkguard do nothing but walk and mutter old words. People respect them the way they respect a winter charm—because it costs nothing and feels safer than admitting fear.”

Harek made a small broken noise of protest.

Connie’s voice came low, for Laika alone. “Not here,” she warned.

Laika swallowed words like nails.

Thrain turned away as if the matter were already settled. “Michael,” he called. “With me.”

Michael hesitated, eyes on Laika.

“Go,” Laika said softly, and hated herself for it.

Michael went.

Harek was hauled up by two guards, half-carried toward warmth. His eyes found Laika again as he passed. He tried to speak. Only a cracked whisper came out.

“It looked at me,” he said, and there was a terrible awe in it. “Like it knew.”

Then he was gone through the arch, swallowed by stone.

Connie watched him go, face unreadable. When she finally turned back, her gaze landed on Laika like a hand on a shoulder.

“You will greet our guests,” Connie said. “You will smile. You will not mention bears or darkness or runners. Stormscar must look steady when the world shakes.”

“And the bear?” Laika asked.

Connie’s mouth tightened. “The bear is a problem we solve without panic.”

That was not belief, not denial. It was Connie doing what Connie always did: refusing to let the world pick the terms of her choices.

Thrain had already started toward the inner ward, dismissing the yard with the certainty of a man who believed certainty could hold walls upright. Connie followed him, because appearances mattered, because ropes must be climbed.

Laika stood in the snow while the wind clawed at her hair like fingers.

Behind her, in the training yard, the visitors waited.

Ahead of her, beyond the gate, the road ran north to beacons and pine and the long white line of nothing.

Laika’s hands went to her daggers.

She thought of suitors and smiles and Connie’s rope.

She thought of the runner’s eyes.

She thought of Skugramal on someone’s lips—common words, old words, words people used like charms against a dark they didn’t truly believe in.

Myrkur tekur allt.

Darkness takes all.

Laika looked up at the nearest beacon-post just outside the gate. In daylight, it was only iron and stone. A basket. A place for flame. Nothing holy.

And yet she imagined it lit against the night, a small stubborn star refusing to die.

She realized, with a clarity that felt like a knife sliding home, that she had been waiting her whole life for something like this.

Something that wasn’t feasting and politics and pretending.

Something that pulled toward the edges.

She turned back toward the inner ward, toward guests and duty and her mother’s smooth smile.

She took three steps.

Then she stopped.

Because on the road—just beyond the last line of packed snow where boots had made a path—something moved.

Not a person.

A shape.

Large. Low. Wrongly silent.

It stepped from between two pines as if it had been there the entire time, watching Stormscar watch itself.

The bear was real.

Even at a distance, Laika could see the torn ear. The scars. The dark fur tipped pale as frost. It stood under the weak winter sun and somehow made the light seem thin.

It lifted its head.

Laika felt the gaze hit her like heat.

Then it turned, slow and deliberate, and padded back toward the trees—toward the north—toward where beacons did not burn by day and most men pretended the dark was only distance.

For a heartbeat, it vanished behind the pines.

Laika stared, breath locked in her chest.

A strip of black cloth fluttered in its fur like a dead ribbon.

She moved before she could think.

“Laika!” someone shouted behind her—Connie, or a guard, or maybe Michael returning too late.

Laika didn’t answer.

She ran for the gate.