His face was set as stone, but I could tell it was masking something deeper, more painful than the timbering of a very old tree.
“If I may ask,” I said. “If the RuneTree was chopped down…”
“It was,” he said.
“Then how can it still power the magik of our world? Why does the Dreadwall still exist?”
“The Dreadwallwasaffected, Ensign,” he said. “It is falling, bit by bit, and causing gaps that allowRhi’Ahrships to slip through. Your unfortunate frigate was one of many lost to theEndorathiland her fleet.”
TheEndorathil.How I dreaded that name.
He shrugged. “The rest is a lesson in higher alchemy that you are not ready for.”
“But I want to know it all.” This time, I didn’t regret my rush of words. They were true, and I was hungry for rune.
His gaze held mine, steady and unblinking, and for a moment we were caught in the same swift waters—two souls drawn by thesame hunger. Was it runechasing, or was it more? The silence stretched, and I thought he might deny me. Then he drew a slow breath, wincing slightly, as if pulling himself back from something even deeper still.
“I will ask Mr. Fahr to teach you,” he said finally. “But you have asked about the boy.”
Bells, he was clever. Spinning this extravagant web of history and political strife, and yet he remembered to bring it back to the very question that had sparked it all. I admired that skill and the mind that could weave it. It was a magik of its own.
“So, when theRhi’Ahrtraitors cut down the Tree, releasing the chimeric and beginning the catastrophic end of our world, they released something else. Something much worse.”
“Worse?”
“You see, your Coward King had made one mistake. One miscalculation even greater than the Abolition, and one that will haunt his name until the end of days.”
I swallowed. These were deep waters, and I would surely drown.
“What was the mistake?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from trembling.
“When he sent his fusiliers to slaughter the Priestlords…”
He leaned back in his chair, a smile sliding like a knife across his face.
“He missed one.”
My heart froze like a northern berg.
Oh, Forge.
“One Priestlord who made vengeance his purpose and set his bones to wreak havoc onbothroyal houses. That Priestlord stole one of those accursedRhi’Ahrships and slipped through the northern Cloudgate Channel.”
Oh, Forge. Oh, Fog. My heart was racing, my insides falling off a cliff.
I didn’t need to ask. I knew. Thanavar was the last living Priestlord.
“But that was twenty years ago…” I did the figures in my head as he watched. “You were only a child when the Priestlords were abolished.”
“Seven suns.”
An image of the captain as a boy sprang into my mind. Laughing turquoise eyes, wild black hair, mischievous grin. Rowdy, impetuous, free. He would have been a handful for any parent or priest, no doubt. But to be that young when his friends, his mentors, his only family, were slaughtered… I shook my head. Grief cut out pieces of the heart, seared itself into the mind in ways that never truly healed.
And so we sat, listening to the creak and hum of the ship. The spell lingered between us, heavy with all we couldn’t say. The silence stretched, but it wasn’t uneasy. It was a balm, and I wanted it to last. A space between two people where words weren’t needed. Where the simple act of living was enough.
Finally, he looked away, and, for a fleeting moment, I missed him.
“I was seventeen when the ships came,” he said quietly. “Eighteen when I swore allegiance to my enemy’s enemy.”
