“No reason!” Rynna blurted, voice shooting a little too high. “What do we do now?”
“Oh. Uhhh…” He dragged his gaze away from Kaelith with visible effort, shaking his head like clearing water from his ears. “She says…we have to protect the world. Destroy the source of the infection before it festers. Before it spreads further.”
A beat passed.
“Illuminating,” Kaelith muttered. “If only all of this had happened back when Mira still had the bird.”
Rynna’s lips parted around the word.Mira?
Then, her eyes went wide as they shot to Kaelith’s face. Heat flushed up the back of her neck, and a strange weight settled in her chest as pieces she hadn’t realized were missing began to slot into place.
“The Mistress of the Hearth was…” she whispered, her voice just barely audible over the crackle of the flames. Her gaze cut back to Bran.
“Hey—that’s one of Hika’s names,” Bran said, his brow wrinkling as he glanced between them.
Rynna turned fully toward him then, studying his face as if seeing him for the first time. The line of his jaw. The shape of his eyes. That fierce, defiant tilt to his chin when he was confused or challenged.
If she swapped the unruly red hair for black, he would have been the exact image of the boy she used to train nearly sixty years ago.
“Ben,” she gasped, turning on Kaelith as anger flared through her.
Bran, alone and unloved in Ember Reach. Treated like something broken. Hidden, blamed, shamed.
“Kaelith.” Her fists clenched at her sides as she advanced. “What did you do?”
Every whisper of his crimes across every Reach echoed in her mind—the betrayals, the bodies, the experiments, the disappearances. She could see them now, stacking one over another until they blurred into something monstrous.
“If you stole that boy from his mother—”
“What boy?” Bran had moved beside her. “Rynna, what’s going on?”
Fenn stepped up on her other side, his presence a focused wall of gravity. “I assumed you knew.” She felt his hand come to rest on her shoulder. “It was before my time, but Kaelith showed up at the end of the last war. Dropped off a child. Then disappeared.”
She couldn’t tear her eyes from Kaelith. “A boy with dark hair. And fire in his eyes.”
Kaelith didn’t answer. He just watched her, his expression carved from stone.
“You’re saying—” Bran’s voice faltered. “He…my father…was one of the children he stole?”
The flames encircling them sputtered, and the groaning undead stilled beyond the wall of fire, heads tilting toward the sudden silence inside the ring.
Then, slowly, the fire rose again—hotter, taller—casting long shadows across the ground.
Bran’s hair caught alight in elemental fire, shimmering along each strand like a crown. His hand rose, palm open, fingers trembling as he stared at the man they all knew was a monster.
“It’s your fault?” His voice was nearly a whisper, but it carried like thunder. “That I grew up with no family. In a village that hated me?”
Fire crawled from beneath Bran’s boots, snaking outward in a glowing path. As it closed on Kaelith, the ground beneath it began to melt, stone liquefying into molten trails of lava.
Rynna froze. She knew what it looked like—what itfeltlike—when someone teetered on the brink of combustion. The air around Bran rippled with heat, thick with the scent of scorched rock.
And if Kaelith had taken that boy…theirboy…for his experiments…
Her heart splintered. Blood thundered in her ears, each beat warped, like a blade drawn over bone. And still, the pain crept higher, raw and frantic, as memories of the Hearth flooded in—laughter, stubbornness, tiny hands gripping hers in training. The boy they had both loved.
Kaelith’s eyes tracked the fire’s approach, expression unreadable. Then he turned back to her. And closed his eyes. Not in defiance. Not even in resignation. Hesqueezedthem shut like it hurt.
Taren and Elara flanked Bran without a word. Shoulders squared, jaws tight, eyes focused on Kaelith with the stillness of people who had made peace with violence long ago.
