“Careful.” The word emerges low, dangerous. “You’re criticizing dragon authority to a dragon Enforcer. In a room full of illegal magic.”
“I’m criticizinginaction.” She doesn’t step back. Doesn’t lower her gaze.Why isn’t she submitting?She stands there, scarred and unbroken, and I cannot look away. “Someone had to do it. So, I did.”
Behind me, my team finishes with the guards. Corveth appears in the doorway, taking in the scene—the altar, the freed man, the witch who isn’t cowering.
“Orders, Enforcer?”
Standard protocol would be execution. Unsanctioned magic use in Flight territory. Interference with official investigations. Half a dozen charges I could name without trying. She’s seen the inside of a ritual site, knows how blood-oaths function, has demonstrated power that could be turned against us as easily as for us.
Kill her. Clean solution. Safe solution.
My fire strains toward her, and I realize with sinking certainty that I am not going to do the safe thing.
“Take the freed citizen to medical processing. Full debrief once he’s stable.” I don’t look away from her. “The witch comes with me.”
Corveth’s eyebrows rise. He knows better than to question.
“The Ash Cells?”
“Yes.” The word tastes wrong even as I say it. The Ash Cells are for dangerous prisoners, threats to be contained and studied. She’s both of those things. But the thought of her in those gray-walled spaces, her magic dampened, her defiance slowly ground away?—
I crush the thought before it can fully form.
“Hands.” I step toward her, producing binding cuffs. “Standard procedure.”
She offers her wrists without protest. Smart. The scars on her skin seem to shift in the altar’s dying light—old bindings, old pain.
The cuffs close around her wrists. She looks up at me—those dark eyes unreadable in the dim light—and says nothing. But her expression shifts. Recognition, maybe. Or calculation.
She’s already working out how to survive me.
The walkthrough Lower Pyraeth takes longer than it should. Riots still burn through adjacent districts, forcing detours. My team surrounds the witch—Alerie, her name is Alerie—in protective formation, though whether we’re protecting her or protecting Pyraeth from her, even I couldn’t say.
She doesn’t speak. Doesn’t stumble. Doesn’t show fear even when we pass through streets still slick with blood from thefighting. Her head stays level, her steps measured, her breathing steady. She’s done this before. The certainty settles in my gut with unexpected weight.
My teeth grind. Something restless shifts beneath my skin—something that has nothing to do with enforcement or duty.
We pass through a market ward checkpoint. Guards snap to attention at my approach, their fear thick enough to taste. Good. They should be afraid. Someone let the Blood Regent’s network grow under our watch. Someone failed.
I’ll find out who. Later. After.
“The riots.” Alerie’s voice slices through my spiral of anger. “They’re slowing.”
She’s right. The screaming has faded from constant cacophony to sporadic bursts. The blood-oaths powering the bound citizens must be degrading—without someone maintaining the network, the magic eats itself. Standard blood magic limitation.
“How did you know?” I don’t look at her as I ask. Looking at her does things to me I’m not prepared to examine.
“I feel the oaths.” Matter-of-fact. She might as well be describing the weather. “The network has a resonance. When it spikes—when someone activates multiple bindings at once—the whole structure destabilizes. I’ve been tracking that instability for weeks, waiting for a chance to hit them while they’re overextended.”
“You used the riot as cover.”
“I used the riot asopportunity.” She pauses. “Same thing you would have done.”
The accuracy pisses me off more than it should. Iwouldhave done the same thing. Would have sacrificed the chaos in the streets for a chance at a more valuable target. The math is simple: save one man from a blood-oath today, prevent a dozen bindings tomorrow.
But she’s not supposed to think the way I do. She’s supposed to be a witch, a prisoner, a tool to be used and discarded.
The Ash Cells wait in the depths below the civic district—underground chambers carved from bedrock, lined with compressed ash that dampens magic without killing it.
