“Ancients witness,” he said, letting the Shadow carry the words up the stone. “By Binding law, the duel is decided. The fire yields to the night.”
Kardoc bucked once under his hand, wild and graceless. Rakhal’s grip held. Shazi stepped to the rim, her face thunder-black. The staff she carried—bone and iron and wrapped skin—drummed once against stone. The sound rolled like a struck bell.
“The rite is sealed,” she said, voice resonant with authority. “By first cut withheld and mercy granted, the old hunger is broken. Let no hand raise blade against the bound while the Shadow watches.”
The Shadow answered.
It came on a wind that had no source and blew no dust—black wind, cool, with a smell like rain on stone. Torches bowed to it and went out, one by one, until the Pit was lit only by the faint and terrible light of the Shadow itself moving like a slow river through all that lived. When the torchline flared back, Kardoc lay slack in Rakhal’s hold, eyes closed, his breath harsh, the blood at his throat already clotting into a dark thread.
Living darkness coiled around Kardoc’s wrists and ankles, around his chest, around the runed collar at his throat. It tightened until the metal groaned, then relaxed, not loosening—accepting. This was an old binding, older than the word for prisoner, the kind used on kings who had to be contained without being destroyed.
Rakhal’s knees threatened to give. He set his foot, found the ground where it needed to be, and stood. The world swam and steadied. His arm shook, then did not. Kardoc’s weight was suddenly very heavy.
Shazi was already moving, barking orders that cut cleanly through the confusion. Captains peeled off to form a ring around the Pit floor. Archers set arrows on strings in case anyone decided law was a thing that could be unmade with courage andstupidity. A few men on the eastern terraces shouted again for Rakhal to finish it; those nearest them looked at the bindings and shut their mouths. The Shadow’s displeasure was a thing no warrior wanted to wear.
Eliza was the last to move. She descended the stairs with the care of someone walking a narrow ledge in high wind. When she reached the floor, she looked at Kardoc once, neither gloating nor pitying, and then at Rakhal. Her expression was steady, her eyes softening with a hint of relief. She offered him her hand, palm up.
He took it. Blood smeared her skin. She didn’t flinch, but the question danced in her eyes.
“If I killed him,” he said, and realized his voice was hoarse, “I’d inherit his hunger.”
“I understand,” she said, simple as water. “You’ve done enough, Rakhal.”
And her words sealed his resolve.
A chant began, ragged at first and then finding itself. It moved through the terraces like a brushfire taking dry grass. Name after name had been thrown at him over the seasons, titles and curses and sounds meant to bind and banish. The one that rose now was stripped of ornament. It was the old name for a leader who had chosen law instead of appetite, who could walk among shadows and not be eaten.
Rakhal.
They weren’t performing; they were agreeing.
He did not look up to catch it on his tongue. He let it pass over him and into the stone where it belonged. He turned to Shazi. “Bind him without iron.”
“Old ways,” she said. “Old words.”
“No cruelty; keep the room empty.”
Shazi’s mouth curved. “You learn quickly, kurkin.” She thumped her staff again, once, and called the shamans down. They knelt around Kardoc and the bindings breathed.
Rakhal let go of Kardoc and stepped back. His hands felt suddenly cold. The cut across Kardoc’s throat had hardly bled—symbolic, precise, a mark that would scar and whisper every time he swallowed. It was the difference between a door and a wall.
He swayed. Eliza’s grip tightened, small, insistent. He found his balance. The Shadow in him was quiet now, neither sleeping nor hungry, just… satisfied.
“Some of our people will rage,” Shazi said, joining them, her eyes raking the terraces. “They will call this weakness for a season. Then, maybe, they will learn that civilization is a wound that keeps us from rotting.”
He huffed a breath that might have been a laugh if there had been more air in him. “Put that on a banner.”
“I might,” she said. “But I’ll carve it on their forearms first.”
They began to climb out of the Pit. Behind them, shamans set their voices to the old cadence, weaving the binding into the ground and into Kardoc’s bones.
At the rim, the wind met them. It tasted different now: less of resin, more of wet iron and ash washed clean. Drums started somewhere far off, not war drums but the low, steady heartbeat that meant the clans were measuring themselves against what they had seen and finding new shapes to stand in.
Eliza did not let go of his hand until the stairs ended. Even then, she brushed her thumb over his knuckles once, as if reminding him of skin and heat and simpler hungers. “You’ll have to explain the binding terms to the captains by dawn,” she said.
“I will.” He looked back down into the bowl. The bindings lay on Kardoc like black water under starlight. “And I’ll have to holdthe line when the first fool tries to cut him loose to force me to spill blood.”
“We’ll hold it,” she said. “Together.”
