Chapter 22: The Third Ambush That Does Not Come

We reached the Ashenveld narrowing at mid-morning of the following day.

I had known it was coming. Cassian had named it two nights prior, in the dry, cartographic language he used when he wanted to give information without commentary: a ravine mouth where the road threaded between two basalt outcroppings, no wider than four men abreast, with a ledge on the eastern face that commanded the entire approach. He had said it the way a man reads aloud from a document he would prefer not to have received. The ravine, he explained, was called the Hound's Collar in the old Ashenveld dialects, and it had been used for tactical interdiction since before the border wars. Anyone wishing to stop a party moving east would do so there.

I had written none of this down. I did not need to. I had simply listened and filed it, and then spent two days walking toward it with the particular quality of attention one pays to a door that may or may not be locked.