…Bring him home.
Chapter forty-six
Talia
Mysai still stank of smoke and death.
Talia swept through the narrow, winding streets of the lower district, her Witchsworn at her back and Skatia prowling at her side. For once, her Sister was silent and brooding rather than filling the air with mocking laughter.
Around them, the city held its breath.
Ash clung to the walls and drifted in gray ghosts along every alley, every courtyard. The last light of day bled across the sea, glinting off helms as Drakmori and Arathian soldiers alike patrolled. They marched like packs of roving jackals ratherthan in rigid formations, but still their boots struck the stones in a rhythm of conquest.
All else was silent.
The silence of a tomb.
Civilians—those who dared to remain in the occupied city—did not walk the streets. They peered from behind shuttered windows and cracked doors. Talia could not see them, but she could feel them. Their gazes pricked at her skin. Hundreds of eyes.
Watching. Fearing.
They had every reason to be afraid.
“This is a waste of time,” Skatia muttered, crimson robes whispering around her ankles as they turned down a narrow lane and approached what had once been a marketplace. Her hand tightened around the hilt of her blade. Its jewel glowed faintly in reply. “We should be out hunting those Elmorian stragglers, not…” Her lips twisted. “Not chasing after trinkets.”
Talia said nothing. To agree was to question.
To question was too dangerous.
She knew Skatia questioned out of fear—fear of her wayward Witchsworn, now out there in the desert once more. Fear that the Mother would learn of him.
Fear that the Lady might finally punish her for her failure.
“But the Lady said it is a weapon we seek,” Talia reminded, softly. Carefully. “Perhaps it is a weapon that will end the war.”
The Lady had shown her the tunnels. The sense of something buried like a sleeping beast beneath the rock. A treasure. Dangerous. Priceless.
But for all that they had been searching for the object ever since their arrival in the city, all she had found within the tunnels of Old Mysai thus far were broken stairwells, flooded passages, and dead ends filled with rubble.
Disappointment shushed through her chest like grains of sand slipping through an hourglass. She was running out of time.
Skatia’s lip curled as they passed a shop with its door hanging partially off its hinges, lamplight leaking through the crack. “But the Lady has never cared forthingsbefore, even weapons,” she went on, pitching her voice low enough that only Talia and the four Witchsworn trailing them could hear. “Souls, yes. But physical objects?”
Skatia tossed a look over her shoulder, as if hunting for eavesdroppers in the dying light. “Tell me you do not find this strange, Sister.”
She did. Of course she did.
But she would never admit to such a thing aloud—
Before she could draw another breath, the air around her seized. The world went cold. The evening breeze died. Sound itself seemed to dull, the distant crash of waves smothered beneath a ringing silence.
A bell tolled inside her skull.
You dare question me?
The Lady’s voice was more than mere sound. It was thunder crashing through her thoughts. It was smoke filling her lungs.
Pain lanced behind Talia’s eyes. White exploded across her vision. Her knees buckled.
