Seori slid in on Taeyang’s blind side, blade flat, not edge, ready to knock, not cut. She moved like a friend coming up behind another friend in the place where the nightmare starts. “Taeyang,” she said. “Stay. With us.”
He turned the wrong way.
The knife whistled past my cheek and took a lock of my hair with it. I didn’t breathe. Jisoo did it for me—wing sweeping up, body between, a wall where my instincts had left a door.
“Minji.” His hand found the back of my neck andheld.“Look at me.”
“I can help him.”
“You can’t.” He didn’t soften it. Jisoo never softens what can get you killed. “He’s not choosing. The wrath is. The cup is. The Brand is. If you go, he’ll choose you the way a storm chooses a tree. He’ll break you trying not to.”
Downfield, a fae guard stumbled into Taeyang’s path, sword half-raised,humanin all the ways that word means late and tired and too slow to understand what’s about to hit you. Taeyang’s hand closed around the blade without looking. Metal screamed. He shoved the ruined thing back into the man’s chest and kept walking.
“Gods.” My stomach flipped. “He’s killing—”
“Everyone,” Jisoo finished, quiet. “On his own.”
I shoved at his chest, feral with the uselessness of it.
“Let me go.”
“No.”
“You don’t get to—”
He wrapped a wing around me like a shield and dragged me backward into the lee of a shattered cart. Enemy arrows hissed into quills and died on feather and ward.
“Hate me later,” he said in my ear. “Live now.”
“I can’t watch this.” I did anyway. That’s the curse of strategy—you see what’s dying and understand why it had to be you and hate that you’re right.
Taeyang slammed a loyalist into the ground so hard the earth bounced. Rheon swept in, shoulder to shoulder, and for a breath it looked like they’d lock—wrath against shadow, brother against brother, the old rhythm they learned in the first house that taught them how to survive. Seori took the opening and slid her blade between Taeyang’s wrists,not to cut,toseparate,to give him a different place to put the hurt. He snarled—didn’t see her—and she had to drop and roll to keep her head.
“Rheon!” I shouted. “Angle him left—toward the low ground—pit him!”
Rheon heard. He feinted high; shadows bit at Taeyang’s knees; the churn drew them toward the shallow wash where roots make bad footing. It might have worked if the world were fair. It isn’t. Daesin, crawling, bloody, laughing, whispered a word that tasted like rusted bells andtilted the field.The slope in Taeyang’s mind found the slope under his boots and the two were so happy to meet that my own feet slid.
“Minji—” Jisoo’s fingers dug into my arm. “Look.”
I looked. I didn’t blink. If you blink, you have to see it twice.
Taeyang stopped moving like a man. He started moving like a ruin. His aura blew out—white flame, then no color at all, the kind of heat that erases edges. The charm Yuna tuckedagainst his heart sparked, flared, and held—for three beats. Then it guttered. The ribbon at his wrist flared once and went dark.
I tasted bile. “Jisoo—”
“I know.”
“We have to—”
“If we go in, we die,” he said. “And if we die, Seori loses her blade and Rheon loses his shadow and Yuna losesus.”
I pressed my fist to my mouth because if I didn’t I would scream. On the balcony, Yuna lifted one shaking hand from the rail and pressed it to the place her mark burned. I could feel her trying tocallhim through a chain designed to turn love into leverage.
“Let me go,” I said again, small this time. “Please.”
Jisoo’s grip gentled. He didn’t let go.
“I can’t,” he whispered. “Not here. Not like this. Not when he can’t see you.”
