The stables were warm and smelled of hay and horse, laced with the sharp tang of ammonia. Every bridle and pitchfork hung in precise, military alignment along the walls. She moved past the stalls of Polan’s prized thoroughbreds—beasts as high-strung and disciplined as their master—and stopped at the loose box at the end.
Shadow. A gelding Polan rarely rode, one whose spirit hadn’t yet been entirely smoothed away.
He nickered softly as she approached, but she silenced him with a hand on his velvet nose. She slipped the bridle over his ears, her fingers fumbling with the cold buckles. She had planned to take a saddle, but the precious minutes lost in the study—staring at the locket, hiding from Marin—had cost her that luxury. Marin would not be fooled for long; he might already be moving toward the back of the house. The creak of leather and rustle of straw seemed to scream in the oppressive quiet.
She led the gelding to the yard. Using a mounting block, she climbed onto his bare back and turned him out onto the track.
For a few precious moments, the rhythmic drum of hooves on packed earth countered the frantic pulse in her veins. She was still within the dead zone, but she was moving.
Once they hit the straight road, the immediate panic settled into a grim endurance. The air of the domain pressed against her, dense and silent. It was a tangible weight, a cold, suffocating pressure that wrapped around her ribs. In that deadened silence, the sensation felt exactly like the feedback stone.
A shudder ripped through her, real and violent. Gessa kicked Shadow faster, desperate to outrun the phantom sensation of Polan’s body against hers.
The Shadowed Tooth, a jagged outcrop of iron-shot rock, loomed to her left. She knew this terrain. Kestrel, Polan’s best Tracer, knew it too. But the hunter wouldn’t move without his master’s command. She had only the duration of Polan’s trip—three days before he returned, found her gone, and unleashed the pursuit. She had to make those days count.
The air at the very lip of the dead zone felt thin and starving. It pulled the breath from her lungs and the sound from the world. She urged Shadow through a final, grasping curtain of iron-barked scrub, bracing herself against the familiar, crushing fatigue that always accompanied travel.
Then, they broke the line.
The change hit her like a physical blow, but not one of pain. The dead, metallic silence of Polan’s land shattered, replaced by a vibrant chorus of unseen life. The air suddenly carried the intoxicating perfume of crushed pine, damp earth, and a sweet, unknown spice.
The band of pressure around her ribs—a weight she had carried since childhood—simply vanished. The low-level throb behind her eyes, the constant lethargy she had been told was a ‘delicate constitution’, evaporated.
She drew a breath, deep and clean. She wasn’t sick. She never had been. She was a creature of magic who had spent her entire life suffocating in a cage of iron.
But beneath the relief, something else woke up.
It started as a warmth in her marrow, pleasant at first, like the flush of wine. A giddy hum vibrated in her fingertips. But the warmth didn’t stop. It sharpened, rising with speed from a comfort to a fever. The hum deepened into a roar that rattled herteeth. The colors of the night brightened and began to pulse in time with her racing heart.
She had been empty of magic for so long that the sudden fullness was agony. She was a vessel overflowing, the pressure building behind her eyes, under her skin, seeking any way out.
And then, the dam broke.
Her power answered the freedom with a violent, tearing surge. Sparks danced before her eyes, her hair crackling with static. The internal pressure turned outward, expanding in a chaotic wave.
Shadow screamed—a sound of pure equine terror as the invisible shockwave of raw magic blasted outward. Muscles coiling beneath her, the gelding reared, eyes rolling white.
Gessa clung on, overwhelmed by the maelstrom. This wasn’t the controlled gift of the Spurs; this was chaos made manifest.“See, Gessa? The Wild Blood. Uncontrolled. Destructive. This is why you need my steady hand.”
Shadow bucked, his hind legs kicking high. Gessa lost her grip. The world spun, and she crashed hard into the earth.
The ground knocked the wind from her lungs. Pain flared white-hot in her ankle, stealing her breath, but the chaos inside her was worse. The magic thrashed without a container, a wild thing tearing at her seams. The forest around her pulsed with vibrancy, every leaf and root shouting its presence in a cacophony that threatened to shatter her mind.
Iron.
The thought was instinct, born of five years in a cage. She needed the very thing that had poisoned her to stop this inferno.
She rolled onto her stomach, ignoring the protest of her injured leg. Her hands clawed at the earth, pushing aside pine needles and damp soil. The Shadowed Tooth rose above, shedding its mineral debris into the forest floor.There had to besomething here.The magic arced from her skin, scorching the moss, smelling of peppermint and burning hair.
Her fingers struck something hard. Not the rough crumble of sandstone, but something dense, unyielding, and cold.
Hematite.
She snatched the heavy stone from the dirt and slammed it against her sternum, curling around it like a dying ember.
The effect was instant and brutal. The iron acted as a sinkhole, drinking the chaotic wildfire from her veins. The roaring static in her ears dulled to a manageable hum. The sparks died. The world stopped pulsing and settled back into the cool, static shadows of moonlight.
Gessa gasped, the air rushing back into her lungs. She lay shivering in the dirt, clutching the dark stone. It made her feel heavy and dull, a familiar sickness seeping back into her bones, but the expansion had stopped. She was contained.
