Lazarus turned to me. His hand gripped my shoulder—a steady anchor—but I barely felt it.
“Can this day get any worse?” I questioned.
My legs felt leaden. Thoughts crowded like stormbirds. I looked at the guard and then at Lazarus. “Looks like my father has a new reason to hate me,” I said, painfully.
Lazarus said nothing aloud; his silence spoke enough. His hand stayed where it was—solid, like an attempt to pin me to the simple earth.
I walked to Nyros and vaulted up. I paused once, taking the cottage in—smoke threading from the chimney, Lazarus standing in the yard like a sentinel, Amara’s silhouette framed in the doorway, the plain door that had swallowed us in warmth. The sight lodged in my chest like a cold stone.
Then I turned back toward the road; the wind cut at my face as if warning me what grief would carve. The ride to the estate felt colder than this afternoon. Ugarit’s towers loomed like waiting jaws; banners snapped harder in the wind. The streets would already be rearranging themselves around the absence of Julian—my father’s sorrow a blade, the house hungering for an heir—and I would be riding straight into that edge, marked and accused before I arrived.
Julian was dead. By the time I reached the gates, the house would already be sharpening its knives—and I would be the first thing they tested them on.
Chapter2
Lazarus
In Ugarit, the dead were never allowed to die quietly.
There were rules—rites older than speech, incised into temple stone and sung in guttural tongues the gods once favored.
A son of House Lorian.
A commander in the king’s legion.
A child shaped by war and expectation.
Julian would not cross the veil alone.
His body returned just after sunset two nights ago—borne on a cedar bier, wrapped in white-dyed linen, bound with river herbs and stamped with red seals of command. They carried him to the temple, where storm and renewal met the threshold between breath and silence. Priests washed him beneath the moon—three times for valor, once for sanctity. Obsidian coins were set over his eyes so the dark would remember the gods. A lion’s tooth was sewn into his sash—the Lorian rite of final passage. Even in death, a Lorian led.
I watched from the edge of the courtyard—close enough to see, far enough not to be seen.
Beside me stood Salvatore.
He did not weep. He did not speak. He held himself like a man who had been whittled and left in the sun—shoulders set, jaw working beneath a thinning beard. His hand found the hilt of his ceremonial dagger and rested there, thumb worrying the leather strap until the skin at the joint whitened. A bruise shadowed his cheek; a red seam split his lower lip. His eyes, storm-colored and brittle, watched the bier as if trying to learn the map of a life he had not been given.
Around the dais, the house performed—nobles in formal grief, their faces composed into the masks duty required; priests recited the older songs, each syllable a knot in the rite; legionaries with shields inverted at their feet, helmets catching the last lean light and throwing it back like false stars. A steward fingered the red seals on the linen, counting them with a look that was not for prayer—a ledger mentally closing, a succession being measured.
I felt the air pull taut, the way a bowstring did before it spoke.
They laid Julian beneath the lion banners on a stone dais slick with sanctified oil and incense ash. Bronze braziers ringed the platform; their blue ceremonial flames hissed at the wind, fed with cedar, barley resin, and crushed lapis—offerings meant to lift the soul. Nobles formed a precise arc, no tears, only the stillness of rank. Behind them, the legion stood like iron reeds, waiting.
And Salvatore?—
He looked as if he had been hewn from obsidian.
But I felt it—his grief. Not loud. Not public. Coiled beneath his silence like something caged, pacing just out of sight.
I had known him too long to miss that kind of quiet. We’d grown up together—not under the same roofs, but in the stolen spaces between our worlds. He used to slip past the torch-lit gates of his father’s fortress and find me in the village, hands soft, voice gentler than any son of a warlord had the right to be.
We climbed fig trees and pretended they were towers. We floated palm fronds down irrigation canals and swore they were warships. We shared stories, dreams—futures we thought we could shape.
Before his father beat the softness out of him.
Before legacy caged him in armor and ceremony.
I was the first to see him cry after every beating. I was always the first to make him laugh again.
