“Thalorin is not dead,” she said, forcing the words past the tightness in her throat.
“No,” Rakhal said, his voice hard and certain. “She wouldn’t surrender what she built. She escaped.” His jaw tightened. “And left others to clean her mess with swords.”
Eliza let the fury rise in her, felt it burn in her throat and pulse at her wrists. She stood within it for a heartbeat, then two, letting it show her faces: the press-gangs, the collars, Maeron walking empty-handed. Then she pressed it down between her ribs, where she kept what she couldn’t afford to show. The crows shifted, banking north as if in answer.
She turned to the scouts, her hands steady. “Take water and food. Then rest where you won’t hear the horses. When you wake, you’ll draw me every alley you crossed. Every crest you saw. Every face that risked looking at you.”
They were taken gently away. Rakhal remained, and the camp’s cold settled in where the news had left.
Eliza looked at the banner the scout had brought. She rolled the cloth, leather stiff with old oil, and passed it to the captain with steady hands and dry eyes.
Back in her tent, the fire burned low and quiet. She spread maps on the table—parchment marked until the ink had bruised through in places. Grain routes. Wells that had survived the siege. River paths where fishermen had always hidden from tax collectors and raiders. She drew a thick line across the southern gate and a thinner one through the northern barracks. She marked the lab quarter with a circle that cut slightly right—Thalorin had always loved asymmetry.
She didn’t hear Rakhal until his shadow fell across the paper. But he’d been beside her the entire time, silent, unwavering. She was used to his steady presence by now—the particular way he occupied space, how the air seemed to bend around him, carrying that distinctive scent of woodsmoke and steel. Often, she found herself craving it, that certainty he brought into a room.
Her body recognized his presence before her mind did, a response she’d stopped fighting.
“They’re conscripting artisans,” she said, letting fury inform her words but not her tone. “Press-gangs through the quarter where my father learned archery by studying the curve of a loom. The workshops feed their war machines now.”
“Then you have what you needed,” Rakhal said.
She looked up. “Needed?”
“A cause no one can question,” he said without softness, without trying to make the words bearable. Only the practical clarity of a man who had learned—through winters and bodies and the arithmetic of war—that sometimes pain deserves truth, not comfort.
“Don’t make this about vengeance,” she said quietly.
“I’m not,” he answered. The Shadow pulsed subtly beneath his skin, responding to her anger rather than trying to calm it. His voice lowered, intimate despite the gravity of his words. “I’m telling you. Fury is the first clean blade.”
His eyes held hers, the connection between them almost tangible in the dim light. “And your fury will be the sharpest of all.”
The maps lay before her, marked with possibility and pain. Eliza’s shoulders had grown tight from hours bent over them, her neck stiff with the weight of responsibility. When she reached to mark another passage, a sudden cramp shot through her hand.
Rakhal noticed immediately—he noticed everything about her now. Without asking permission, he stepped closer and took her hand between his. His palms were rough with calluses, warm against her cold fingers.
“The queen’s hands should not falter,” he said, his voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry beyond the tent walls.
His thumbs pressed into her palm, finding tension she hadn’t realized was there. The Shadow within him seemed to retreat from his fingertips, leaving only the man, only heat and pressure working methodically against her cramped muscles. Something electric passed between them as he worked—not quite the Shadow’s power, something more elemental.
Eliza allowed herself three heartbeats to feel it.Just three.His hands around hers, his focus absolute, as if this small service to her was as crucial as any battle plan.
On the fourth beat, she gently withdrew her hand, though not before his thumb traced once across her inner wrist, featherlight, where her pulse jumped beneath her skin.
“Thank you,” she said, the words carrying more weight than they should.
Rakhal stepped back, but something had shifted in the air between them. They were both marked by power now, each in their own way. The difference was that his touch left warmth, not scars.
They regarded each other across the map where the Tower stood like a dark tooth. After a moment, her breath left her like a released bowstring.
“Good,” she said, not because the situation deserved the word but because it was the correct piece to place. “Then we’ll start with the gates.”
Word spread through camp, fast and tight, the way good orders travel when they’re made of actions, not wishes. By dusk, the council hall was full—Shazi near the hearth with her braids tucked up, two Ketheri defectors with mud-caked boots, a handful of Maidan loyalists with city soot in their skin. The room smelled of tallow and iron, old wood and damp wool. Wind pushed once at the door-hide and left.
Eliza stood with one hand on the map, the other open. “Tell me,” she said, and they did.
The first defector, a gray-haired man with a knight’s bearing worn down by bone-deep weariness, spoke of rotations. “The northern gate is thin. Six-day watches. Men pulled from farms who know grain better than walls. They change crews at night to save daylight for work.” His finger traced the parapet. “They’ve fewer archers than they pretend.”
“The southern river docks,” said a loyalist woman with old fish-scars on her hands, “are still ours. The guilds don’t say it publicly, but they haven’t paid the crown a full tally. They remember where their bread came from.”
