“Yours.”
CHAPTER 6
Rune
The shadows stirred in the cave as Rune summoned the Veil’s Eye.
It unfurled into a thin sheet of shadow peeling open like silk drawn from darkness. Its surface rippled like black water. Rune bent it to his will, searching for any pocket of darkness near the one who he wished to see.
Within the veil, shapes and color cleared until she appeared.
Alora.
Rune stilled at the sight of her. Of those honey brown eyes he had not seen for a hundred-and fifty- years. She stood at the edge of a forest as her voice spilled into the world.
The melody drifted through Karag Dûr and into his prison with a softness that did not belong in stone. It threaded through the threads of his being. The shadows pooled and twitched across the cold ground, bending toward her. They had woken the moment her song had reached him in a place no life dared tread.
Many had sung Rune’s song before. This was different.
She didn’t sing to call to him, but it reached him all the same.
The sound was a tether in the dark and the urge to go to her wrapped around his sanity with desperation. Rune’s strained against the chains, looking up at the open sky but the beam of sun hit cheek with a force that warned him back. The chains scorched against his skin to the bone.
The song abruptly ended.
The shadows surged toward the crevice in the ceiling, desperately searching for escape beyond the prison’s bounds, as if they could crawl out and search forher. Rune dragged them back with a snarl before the sun could take more of him than it already had.
He forced his gaze back into the Veil.
Alora strolled toward her small cottage. Her heartbeat tugged in his chest like gravity shifting. Like the pull of fate brushing against his soul.
Alora.
Alive.
How? Why?
For a heartbeat it was so impossible, Rune’s mind rejected it, tried to name it illusion, madness, punishment.
Then Alora opened a letter and dread made her hands tremble. Her dread sank in his bones as if it belonged to him.
Then he followed her shadow.
The Veil did not care for roads. It cared for darkness. Rune was a presence behind her steps. Lingering in the seams of her cloak. The underside of a lantern on the streets. Rune rode those small pockets like footholds, chasing her across the Midlands to the Thornbearer’s manor.
Then he was in the shade of a willow, watching Zinnia deliver news that made the wind rise and the shadows ripple through the Veil.
He stayed with her until the forest faded and stone and iron of Argyle rose around her like a dreary fortress of grief.
The cursed kingdom he had once sworn to reduce to ash.
And now Rune clung to the dark pleats of the heavy curtains framing the windows of Alora’s old bedchamber. He watched her reunion with a friend. He watched Laurent embrace her with a lie on his breath. He watched the quiet despair in her eyes when she learned of the engagement.
But none of it made sense.
Because Rune had seen this all before.
Alora returning. The empty welcome. The haunted garden. The plan for her hand in marriage, like a bargain struck with wolves. He remembered her voice in that very dining room, shaking with disbelief as her father told her what she would be traded for peace.
