I’m holding her before she can hit the stone, her body almost a dead weight in my arms, boneless and still. Her head lolls against my shoulder, her scent filling my senses. The world narrows to the feel of her, the absolute silence where her fierce, defiant energy should be.
“Give her to me,” Warden Blythe commands, stepping forward.
“No.” The word is a low rumble, a promise of violence that stops the old witch in her tracks. I ignore Brynn’s stricken face, the way her hands flutter uselessly at her sides. I adjust my grip, cradling Esme against my chest, and turn from the altar’s sickening glow. “She will rest in her bed, surrounded by her own scent, her own possessions. The place where her spirit will recognize its territory and recover. Send your nurses there.”
Dragons understand the importance of one's lair during healing better than their kind ever will.
I carry her out of that damned chamber, my stride measured and unstoppable. Darkbloods flatten themselves against the corridor walls as I pass, their eyes wide. They see a dragoncarrying their champion, and they do not know what it means. Let them wonder. Let them fear.
Her turret room is cold, the air thin and sharp. I lay her on the bed, pulling the rough woolen blanket over her, and settle into the adjacent hard wooden chair. My body still thrums with barely contained violence. The urge to return to that chamber and incinerate Blythe where she stands is a living thing coiled in my chest. But I force myself to remain still, to watch the shallow rise and fall of Esme's chest beneath the blanket.
I have a plan, but it is not an instant one. I must wait for the right moment. No matter how intolerable that wait is.
Her face, usually so carefully controlled, is unguarded in unconsciousness. The severe line of her jaw softens. Her lips part slightly with each breath. A strand of black hair has fallen across her cheek.
My fingers twitch with the impulse to brush it aside, to feel the silk of her hair and the warmth of her skin.To claim this small, simple piece of intimacy.
The door creaks open. Two darkbloods in the stark white robes of healers enter, their faces grim. They move with quiet efficiency, their eyes flicking from Esme’s still form to me, a silent, wary question in their gazes. I do not move from the chair. I watch as they check her pulse, murmur incantations, and place poultices of crushed herbs on her brow and wrists. They work around me as if I am a mountain, an immovable piece of the landscape. Which I am.
I let them work, but I keep my eyes on Esme while the hours bleed into one another. When the nurses leave, twilight has deepened into a true, starless night. The only light in the room comes from a single candle they left burning, its flame dancing and casting long, skeletal shadows on the walls. I remain in the chair, a sentinel in the dark, listening to the soft, unsteady rhythm of her breathing. I watch her, and I wait.
Meanwhile, our bond is restless, a current of shadow and fire that I feel beneath my skin, and it seems to carry the phantom ache of her ordeal. Yet she chose this.Chose to be broken by a ghost rather than be completed by a king… for what else could Helena have meant?
I rise and move to the bedside, the stone floor cold beneath my soles. The shadows paint hollows beneath her cheekbones, making her look fragile, breakable.
A lie. She is made of Salem steel and stubbornness.
I finally reach out, my hand hesitating for a heartbeat before my fingers, calloused from centuries of wielding both sword and power, ghost over the curve of her cheek.Mine. You are mine to protect, not to lose to the foolish pride of your coven.
The contact is electric. The bond flares, a bridge of fire between us. And this time, through that bridge, something else crosses over.
A shimmer in the air near the door. A translucent figure, clad in the robes of an ancient darkblood, drifts through the room, its form indistinct, its face a blur of sorrow. It pays us no mind, passing through the far wall as if it were smoke.
I snatch my hand back as if burned. The spirit vanishes. The air is empty again. Still.
My heart hammers against my ribs. Coincidence? A trick of the light? No. I stare at my hand, then back at her sleeping face. A theory, wild but not impossible, begins to form. Slowly, deliberately, I place my hand back on her cheek.
The connection re-establishes itself, the fire in my veins flaring to life. And the world tilts on its axis. The room is no longer empty. The spirit I saw before is gone, but another one drifts near the ceiling, a faint, weeping woman whose form is riddled with shimmering holes.
I keep my hand on Esme’s skin, a warm anchor in a suddenly shifting reality, and turn my gaze to the window. It is no longerjust a view of the dark forest and the academy grounds. It is a city of ghosts. Spirits drift between the trees, some bright and distinct, others little more than smudges of sorrowful light. Those who have already mended since I scattered them back at Heathborne, and those who are still finding their shape again. Esme’s first trial has likely sped up the process.
They move through the stone walls of the coven, a silent, spectral population living a life unseen. Our bond… it has given me an unexpected sight. A key to a door I never knew I could open.
My fascination with what we are, what we could become, deepens into something akin to reverence.
But the wonder is tainted. Beneath my palm, I sense the agony of her sleep. It is not rest. It is a battlefield. Images, feelings, nightmares—the taste of blood and failure, the cold of annihilation, the terror of becoming a ghost, a strange, all-consuming, hollow hunger... She is trapped in remembering what she went through. Even now, the Grave Recall hasn’t truly left her.
I force my attention back to the window, to the sea of spirits, searching for anything that might be of use or interest. My eyes scan the spectral chaos.
Then I see her. A spirit moving with purpose. Helena. She is a frantic vision, her form flickering like a dying candle as she flees across the main courtyard. She glances over her shoulder as if pursued by hell-hounds before passing through the stone wall of the armory and vanishing.
My breath catches.Helena. For the first time in over two centuries, I saw her with my own eyes, and she was a frightened wisp, a shadow of the brilliant, infuriatingly sharp mind I once called a friend. We spent decades debating the nature of the Tripartite system, sharing secrets over a smuggled draconic draught, her wit a blade that could match my own. Now,something hunts her. Something has shattered that formidable spirit and sent her fleeing through her own ancestral home like a startled doe.
What? What is she running from?
Something else arrests my attention. A familiar, living figure emerges from the shadows below, following a different path. Byzu. He moves with a hunter’s purpose, his destination clear: the forest’s edge.
What is my brother doing?I pull my hand from Esme’s skin—reluctantly—and the world snaps back to its mundane, ghostless state. Silent as smoke, I pass from her room and slip out into the biting night air. My senses are on fire as I approach the trees, searching for the scent of my brother.
