The world unclenched all at once.
Metal hissed. The ridge exhaled shadows like a lung. A dagger cracked the air past my cheek, spinning end-over-end toward the narrow gap between boulders where Rheon had just reappeared—alone, eyes narrowed at the shape of our formation as it rearranged without orders.
I didn’t think. I threw.
Steel met steel with a sound that lifted the small hairs along my arms. The dagger’s arc broke, skittered off the knife I’d snapped into its path, bit stone and sparked.
“Down!” I shouted, even as the tree line vomited men.
Not men. Demons—old loyalties given meat and orders. Armor cut with House Korr marks. Old sigils burned over with new, ugly ones. They poured from the pines and from the seam in the ridge that the map had mistaken for a fold in the earth. Someone had done their homework on Rheon’s habits—on ours.
Rheon’s sword was in his hand before the warning finished leaving my mouth. Calm and deadly, he moved like a decision. “Stand your ground!” he called, and the words made space for us to fit inside them.
Taeyang broke like storm. His first strike folded a man in half; his second sent a blade spinning from another’s fingers and into the throat of the one who thought he was safe because he had waited at the back to watch.
Jisoo went quiet the way angels do in old stories before old stories learned to fear quiet. His shadow slipped under a charging demon’s feet, twisted, toppled him; the light in Jisoo’s left hand became a short blade that punched between ribs like an apology you meant to speak last year.
I count. It’s how I stay alive. Six. Ten. Fifteen. More cresting the ridge. The uncles hadn’t come with bravado—they’d brought a small, ugly army and the kind of plan that assumed we would have been polite enough to die.
“Left!” I called as two broke for Seori’s empty flank—habit had me placing her even when she wasn’t here yet—and corrected, “West path!”
Rheon shifted to cut them off, white pennon snapping on his back like a dare. “Parley terms violated,” he said, and his blade rang off Daesin’s with a sound like a bell tolling its own funeral. “Consider this notice.”
Fire took the pines at our rear—green wood screaming. Somewhere a wardstone shattered, the pitch of the realm’s hum warping, then righting as Seori’s distant magic reached through it and tightened the weave. She wasn’t here, but her will was: the wards shivered awake, lowering a dome along the ridge so no gate could open under our feet.
Vorren came for me with a long knife and that bright, ugly smile men show girls they intend to hurt. I met him halfway. Steel rang. Heat flashed my palm as the sigil-ink I’d painted there came alive—three interlocking crescents sparking into a temporary shield that snarled the edge of his blade for one precious second. I used it to break his wrist. He hissed and went for my eyes. I ducked and cut his thigh high where the artery surges. He reeled, already calculating how quickly he could bind and reengage.
“Minji!” Jisoo’s voice—closer than I expected, softer than I wanted—pulled my head a hair; the swing I didn’t see should have opened my back. His blade caught it. The shock traveled through him into me, a shared jolt that tasted like salt and something I refused to name.
“Don’t you dare,” I snapped, because anger is a cleaner shield than memory in a fight.
“Later,” he said, which is the kind of lie men tell when they plan to bleed before they speak.
We fell into each other’s rhythms like muscle memory is a traitor. He stepped; I spun. He drove a knee; I cut above it. Our circle widened, narrowed, cracked open again. House Korr fought like men who had been taught that cruelty was cleverness. Every feint was meant to draw a scream. Every scream was meant to be a lesson.
“Enough,” Rheon said, and it wasn’t loud, but the ridge seemed to hear it. He turned his wrist, broke Soric’s guard, and put the clean edge of his sword along the line where jaw meets throat without taking what it asked for. “Lay down steel.”
Garran grinned bloody and spat. “Kingling. Cousin-beggar.”
Rheon’s eyes went winter. “They want war,” he said, not to Soric, not to us—just into the air where choices decide what they are. “Then let them have it.”
The words moved like a drumline through our bones.
House Korr surged. I didn’t think about Yuna’s parents or Seori’s patience or Rheon’s vow to carry white before iron. I thought about Yuna’s hands shaking over a cup she didn’t drink from, about Taeyang watching her mouth as if each breath were a thing he had to memorize to remember how to live. I thoughtabout Jisoo’s letter I never read and his mouth forming my name like it belonged to him anyway.
Vorren feinted low, then went for my throat. I let him think he had me long enough to see his face the way it was when he believed he was winning. Then I slammed my bracer into his wrist again and drove my forehead into his nose. Cartilage cracked. He staggered and laughed, because men like him think pain is proof they matter.
“Minji.” Jisoo again, but the tone different warning wrapped in a promise to bleed for it. His shadow leapt, grabbed a thrown spear out of the air in a grip no physics class would forgive, and yanked it just enough that it grazed Rheon’s shoulder instead of taking his throat.
“Shadeguard!” Rheon barked. “Hold the ridge! Ashwalkers—now!”
Our hidden line broke cover, the Ashwalkers climbing the rock face like it remembered them from other wars. Bows up. Arrows sang—blunt-song, not beautiful, meant to end arguments. Two of House Korr’s rear guard went down like questions answered.
Taeyang hit Daesin so hard the man’s blade rang out of his hand and into the ravine. “You don’t get to speak her name,” Taeyang told him, voice low and ruined. “You don’t get to think it.”
Daesin grinned—and I saw the small flick of his eyes past Taeyang’s shoulder. “But I get to take your king.”
He threw a second dagger—the kind you hide up a sleeve so your opponent thinks you’re done. It spun toward Rheon, beautiful and true.
