Daesin chooses talking while he tries to gut me. “She’ll watch you die,” he murmurs, soft as rot. “The King will make her hold the balcony rail and smile. Your corpse will be the proof that his law works.”
“I already died,” I say, catching his wrist, turning it, feeling tendons squeal, “and nobody got to write the ending but me.”
I cut him across the mouth to see if that ruins the way he saysboy. It does. He screams, spits blood, and hooks his leg behind mine. We go down in a knot of metal and mud. He rolls, heavier, older. He tries to grind my face into the crossed roots. I let him press me, feeling the old panic try to crawl up my spine—the house on fire, the breath going thin. I grab it by the throat and teach it how to listen.
“You think kneeling makes you tame,” he hisses. “You think loving makes you weak.”
I smile—more teeth than kindness.
“I think loving makes meaimed.”
I head-butt him. Bone meets bone; his nose breaks. I follow him down, knife to collarbone, pry into the seam between armor and artery. He claws for a rune, finds none. I leave him there with the sound a man makes when he realizes the world will keep going without him.
Garran is up again. They always are. He has a short sword now, fast and ugly. He grinds it along my blade to throw sparks in my eyes. I blink, feel heat, feel something else—an old notch in my bones, a small click like a lock noticing a key.
Share drink, share word.The King’s cup. The first command:You will hunt House Korr by my command. You will report to my councilors. You will present proof of each death to my hand.
I feel the incline in my mind, a slope the cup carved. Not absolute. Just gravity, bent. Each uncle’s breath that stutters makes the pull a little tighter, a little more right. My chest goes strange, too large for my ribs. A cold kiss under the sternum. A heat rising under my skin that isn’t sweat.
“Eyes,” Rheon calls—warning, not request.
I don’t look away from Garran. I hear Seori’s whistle—a line of notes that meansleft flank falling; Minji moved; Jisoo airborne—and the war clarifies into a map I know how to read.
Idisarm Garran with a hook and a twist; his blade clatters. He lunges for my throat with bare hands. I let him get close—close enough to smell the old resin on his armor, the smoke in his beard—and slide my dagger between his ribs, up, under, into the foyer where a heart once held guests.
His eyes widen, then settle.
“She won’t save you,” he sighs, and it sounds like confession.
“She doesn’t have to,” I say. “I save me now.”
He falls, heavy as debt.
The loyalists surge to cover the loss of a story. I cut, block, bleed, move. The valley turns into a red river with too many names floating in it. I keep mine, because she asked me to.
Across the line, Vorren shouts a word that tastes like burnt pennies. The air goes sharp; a flare rips skyward from his palm and bursts above the field—a blossom of blistering light. For a breath, everything is too bright. Then the heat folds back down, heavier, slow—ashfall in reverse. It lands on skin and sizzles like shame. Men scream. Seori throws a ward with the flat of her blade; Rheon eats light with shadow; Jisoo’s wings snap, shedding embers.
I pull Vorren down by the chain around his neck and teach him the mercy he never learned: quick. My knife takes his throat before he can finish the second syllable of the third hymn he loves more than breathing.
Two down. One crawling away, Daesin’s mouth a ruin, eyes burning with the kind of hate that builds altars out of other people’s names.
“Taeyang!” Minji’s voice—close, thin, cut on urgency. “Back!”
I don’t listen fast enough. Something hits—nota blade. A sound, pitched where only old wounds can hear it. It threads my bones, finds the brand Korr blood leaves under the breastbone, and tugs. The rune in the peace-cup wakes like a dog hearing its master’s step. The two magics recognize each other and smile, pleased to meet.
Heat climbs my spine. Cold kisses my tongue. My hands don’t shake; theyhum. Not with fear. With the beginning of the thing I swore not to let own me again.
Wrath.
I feel it uncoiling, a serpent under floorboards that resented every gentle step I took to keep the house from creaking. I hear her name—Yuna—like a bell behind glass. I try to hold to it. The glass fogs.
Across the churned field, Daesin laughs blood into the dirt. “There you are.”
“Taeyang!” Rheon again, nearer now. “Eyes on me.”
I try.
In the corner of my vision, a figure on a balcony becomes a prayer. The ribbon at my wrist sears violet. The charm she tucked against my heart burns like a coal trying to teach my chest how to be a hearth and not a kiln.
