Erdeth Greycloak left Sandgate behind him and climbed the switchbacks toward Cloudhollow Pass with Goarth trotting at his heel, carrying with him the hard lessons of the mountain and the poacher's blood already on his hands. He arrived at the Ember Circuit gathering a sharper man than he had been, and it did not take him long to see what others had missed: the favorite yearling bound for the finish line was not bred to win, but burned to it, its coat slick with pitch and char, its eyes gone glassy and dull. The handler's stained hands told the rest of the story, and the brass cloven-hoof token at his belt matched one Erdeth had already taken off a dead poacher in the high country. The pieces fit together into something ugly: an honest goat could never beat a doped one, and someone was growing rich off it.
Rather than confront the handler outright, Erdeth slipped in close, drew his attention with idle admiration of the yearling, and let Goarth do what Goarth did best. The clever ember goat lifted the feed bag from under the handler's nose and vanished into the crowd, leaving Erdeth to talk his way out clean, pitch-stained grain in hand. He carried the proof straight to Hjalmar Ironstone, the Circuit's starter and judge, who named the handler at once: Corvus Wintermoor, a man three seasons running who had never been caught. Hjalmar meant to scratch the favorite and knew it would come to violence. He was right.
When Hjalmar called Wintermoor out before the gathering, steel came out fast. Wintermoor and two hired hands moved against Erdeth, but it was Wintermoor who went down first, a rapier through the chest, and Erdeth left the blade buried in him as he poured the stolen pitch over the body where it fell. The hired hands broke and ran into the dark. With the favorite scratched and its handler dead, the field opened, and Erdeth paid his way into the race with Goarth starting from the back of the pack. The ember goat ran like something out of legend, a clean break from the gate and a sharp read of every switchback, only to shy at the crowd and the torchlight on the final stretch and finish a length behind the winner. The purse slipped away, but Goarth came back to lean against Erdeth all the same, trust unbroken.
It was in the shadows near the skin-tents that the night turned darker. Erdeth overheard Barragan Irongrave, the money man behind Wintermoor's doping, ordering a crew of five to hunt him down before the torches burned out. Forewarned, Erdeth fled into Rockfall Gorge, but Hjalmar followed, unaware of the danger closing on them both. The ambush that followed cost blood on both sides. Erdeth picked off one bandit from hiding, broke line of sight again and again as crossbow bolts hunted for him in the dark, and dropped another of Irongrave's men with his bow. But Hjalmar was caught on an exposed shelf, shot and left dying, then finished by a bandit's blade and a second bolt before Erdeth could reach him. The starter and judge of the Ember Circuit died alone on the rock, his iron crook clattering into the gorge below.
Erdeth answered in the only way left to him. He took up Hjalmar's horn and blew it, calling down the Circuit's own goat herd in a stampede that scattered what remained of Irongrave's crew into the night. In the quiet after, he searched Hjalmar's body and found a note sewn secretly into the jerkin, three seasons of evidence meant for him alone, the grey-cloaked boy: Wintermoor had doped the favorites, Irongrave took the winnings, and the ledger proving it all sat in a black-wool tent west of the gate. Erdeth recovered the iron crook, raised a cairn over Hjalmar in the gorge, and carried his grief back to the gathering.
There, he stood before the crowd and named the races crooked, Hjalmar murdered for what he knew, everyone's safety hanging on it being stopped. But fear and doubt split the gathering rather than uniting it, and no one rallied to his cause. Worse, word of his accusation slipped back to Irongrave's watchers before the torches had even guttered out. Only the goatherd Cormac believed him, hiding Erdeth in his cart through a long and dangerous night while Irongrave's men swept the gathering searching for him. Pressed flat in the straw, barely breathing, Erdeth went unfound as the searchers moved past, and by morning he lay safe, rested, and whole, with the book and the man behind it all still waiting west of the gate.