“To see…”
The apothecary.
The handfast.
The potion.
Viktor pushed up, blanket slipping to his waist.
Outside, the camp turned in its sleep: a horse stamped, a strap creaked, some watchman whispered a prayer he did not finish.
On the table the vial waited: glass the color of stormlight, wax dark as blood. Viktor reached for it with steady fingers—but its weight stirred violence in his hand.
“You can still choose not to,”The Midnight said, something rising in his breath.
“No,” Viktor answered, throat raw.
“The Elders sent you to wake me before battle. I don’t have a choice anymore.”
He broke the seal.
The scent climbed—a bitter bloom, like crushed laurel and lightning. He tipped it, let the draught burn a road down his chest, flare in the furnace of his scars, then settle like a brand against his heart.
The world narrowed to pulse and heat.
“Hold to me, brother,”The Midnight murmured.“We go together. Take my hand.”
Viktor closed his eyes and found it—the cool pressure at his palm, the meeting of two grips that had been searching seventeen years in the dark.
The potion struck.
Light splintered under his skull.
The brazier’s glow blew wide into a ring, and the ring became an eye, and the eye opened.
Cloth and pole and cord fell away.
The tent skin thinned to water, and he was falling through it—through smoke, through halls of memory, through a corridor where light pierced the dark.
“Don’t fight it,”The Midnight said, nearer now.“Breathe, Tory.”
He did.
The river of light forked.
On one branch—two newborn cries braided together, the ache-bright certainty of same. Adamar’s breath mirroring his own, two small fists grasping at the same sun. A woman’s exhausted laugh. A father’s trembling hands. Twins wrapped in one woolen blanket.
He could feel her warmth, her sigh, her hair.
Momma.
She kissed one brow, then the other.
“Adamar,”she breathed.“For my father, and for the blood that carried me here.”
Her gaze held on the second child.
“And you… Viktor. Because that is what you are.”
