The Soul the veil kept: BOOK TWO

CHAPTER ONE: SIX WINTERS

The Veil had not flickered again in six years, and Wren Ashcombe had learned not to trust the stillness.
She rode the border alone now, as she had every season since becoming Dawnwarden in truth and not merely in training — full mantle, full weight, full silence. The anchor stones no longer required a Duskwarden's counterpart to steady them; Noctane had appointed a new one, a stern, capable woman named Isolde Vane who performed her half of the rite with brisk professionalism and never once looked Wren in the eye longer than duty required. It was easier that way. Wren had made sure of it.
"You could bring an escort," said Arlo, riding beside her now as he did most seasons — Lord Vale in truth these days, his father's disgrace having emptied the title into more careful hands. Six years had sharpened him, worn the boyishness from his face and left something steadier in its place. "The Council would sleep easier."
"The Council sleeps too easily as it is," Wren said. "That's how the last conspiracy nearly worked."
Arlo let it go, the way he always did when she mentioned the Convergence without mentioning what — who — the Convergence had cost. He was, these days, the closest thing she had to a confidant, and even he did not push past the places she'd built walls.
They reached the anchor stone at midday. The Veil shimmered above it, gold and silver woven together the way it had been for three hundred years, the way it had been remade, once, at a cost Wren still felt some mornings like a phantom ache in hands that had held fire and lost everything else.
It was Arlo who saw the shape first, crumpled at the base of the western stone, half in Noctane's grey shadow and half in Virell's dying gold light.
"Wren." His voice had gone sharp, careful. "There's someone here."
A man. Young, dark-haired, unconscious, dressed in nothing that marked him as citizen of either kingdom — plain cloth, no sigil, no blade. Wren knelt beside him, checking for breath, and found it, steady and slow.
Then he stirred, and his eyes opened, and Wren's entire carefully rebuilt world tilted sideways on its foundation.
One eye was gold, the exact amber-gold of a Virellan sunfire wielder's Kindling flame.
The other was silver, the exact pale shade of a Noctane moon at its fullest, coldest height.
"Where—" the stranger managed, voice cracked from disuse, and then his gaze found Wren's face, and something in it recognized her, plain and immediate and impossible, before confusion swallowed it whole. "I don't— I don't know your name. I should. Why don't I know your name?"
Behind her, Wren heard Arlo go very still.