Chapter 89. Dawn Knife

The Moon tested us at a time that felt like an insult: morning.

The thirteenth night had been quiet—too quiet, the kind of quiet that makes the Steppe itself seem to crouch. We broke and set camp again, went through the motions of ordinary survival like maybe if we pretended hard enough, the extraordinary wouldn’t notice us.

At first light, the air changed. Not a wind, not a smell. A pressure. The way the world feels before storms—or births.

Orla stiffened at my shoulder. “Do you feel that?”

“Yes,” I said. The brand at my collarbone warmed, cooled, warmed again, like a hand tapping a pulse.

“Positions,” Syra called, because Syra has no time for poetry. “Quiet lines. Eyes on the low.”

The Moon didn’t come in a body. She came as a condition: a blue-white hush that stripped the color from the Steppe, left us all bone and salt.

Three riders crested the eastern ridge. No banners. No armor. The one in the middle moved like the saddle had been shap