The wards had held for three centuries. Caelindra knew this because her grandmother had told her, and her grandmother's grandmother before that — an unbroken chain of women who pressed their palms to the cold iron and felt the hum of something ancient holding the world together. Tonight, the hum was silent.
She stood at the base of the Thorngate, its arch rising forty feet above the cobbled approach road, the runes hammered into its surface dark and inert. The torch she carried threw orange light against metal that should have glowed faintly blue. It did not. Her breath made small clouds in the October air and she watched them dissolve, as if the night were eating everything small.
"Ward-Keeper." The voice came from behind her. Lieutenant Ossian, young enough that the military title still sat awkwardly on him, approached with two of the garrison soldiers flanking him like brackets. "The Duke is asking for your assessment."
"Tell the Duke," Caelindra said without turning, "that I do not yet have one." She pressed her bare palm to the iron and felt nothing. Not cold. Not warm. Just the dumb reality of metal, empty of any purpose beyond its own weight. In thirty-one years of Ward-Keeping she had never felt that emptiness. She was not prepared for how frightening it was.