The Stone-Eater's Trial

The horn blast is still echoing off the shale when you hear Lorn's cough—a wet, tearing sound that cuts through the cold air like a blade. You don't turn around. You can't. If you look at your brother now, wrapped in that filthy blanket, his cheeks flushed with fever, you'll see what everyone else sees: a dead boy waiting for winter.

So you tighten your grip on the climbing pick instead, feeling the worn leather bite into your palm, and you stare up at the mountain.

It looms above the village like a god made of teeth, its face scarred with crevasses and wind-carved hollows. Snow dusts the upper ridges, but lower down, the stone is bare and black and slick with frost. The trial's first gate is a narrow cleft in the rock, barely wide enough for two men to squeeze through shoulder-first. The other competitors are already moving toward it—eight of them, men and women from the outlying homesteads, all of them carrying the same desperation in their eyes.

All of them carrying the same hunger.

Varen is the last to pass you. He doesn't look at you, but you feel his gaze anyway, cold as the wind that skims down the mountainside. "Your brother's got a month at most," he mutters, just loud enough for you to hear. "Maybe less."