An old woman with a voice like cracked ice pointed a gnarled finger toward the crowd. “We must submit. Send envoys to Irongate. Swear fealty. It is the only way.”
Murmurs, heavy and sullen. Some nodded. Others shook their heads, faces pinched with anger.
“And if she decides we are not worth sparing?” Another Elder spat. “Haedor was a jewel! What are we? A salt-stained ruin clinging to the cliffs?”
The argument flared again, louder, rawer, like a wound refusing to close. Mathias listened, heart hammering against his ribs, the familiar sensation of being apart from the world around him settling deeperinto his bones.
He knew how they looked at him. Even now, even in this fear-drenched hour, the space around him was wider than the press of bodies suggested. People lean away without realising it. Parents pulled their children closer. A fisherman’s wife crossed herself when his gaze brushed hers – not with any gesture taught now, but with a gesture passed down and never quite forgotten. Palm to brow, then lips, then chest. A warding sign, meant to bind the tongue and blind the eye, so prophecy would pass her by. She did it without thinking, and the fear in her eyes said she still half believed.
The Seer.
He was the Seer.
And no matter that he had lived among them his whole life, no matter that he had bled and wept and worked alongside them, he would never truly be one of them.
Because he had Seen.
The Sight was not magic, but even in a world where dragons had been slain and gods had fallen silent, it remained – stubborn and unexplained. A final curse or a fading gift from the old gods, depending on who you asked. A remnant of a time when the divine still walked among men, before the world turned cold and godless. It touched whom it wished, without pattern, without mercy, and it never came without cost.
For every Seer, the cost began the same way; their first vision was always their own death. He, too, had seen his – a brutal, fragmented glimpse. Fire, not merely burning, but devouring, tearing his chest open in a searing void. The metallic tang of blood and the sickening scent of burning flesh filling the air. A crown, wreathed in flame, falling with a sound like shattering bone. And above him, sharp and cold against the smoke, the stars – countless, indifferent, watching as his life guttered out likea snuffed candle.
It had come to him at eight years old, in a blinding torrent of sound and colour, seizing him by the spine and slamming him against the stones of the harbour wall until he could barely breathe. He had screamed then – he remembered that much. The sound had torn from his throat like a wounded animal.
And when it was done, when he had collapsed into the salt-stained mud, the town had looked at him differently. Like something broken. Like something dangerous.
His parents had abandoned him not long after, shamed and terrified by what he had become. They had whispered among themselves, like so many others, that the Sight would drive him mad, that he would become a danger to himself and everyone around him. Better, they thought, to cast him away before the madness took root. Because the madness always took root. Who could see their own death in vivid detail and not lose their minds? No, his parents had thought. Better to lose a son than invite ruin upon their house, and by extension, their city.
It was Maeve, his mother’s elder sister, who had defied them all. She had taken him in without hesitation, claiming him as her own when no one else would. She fed him, clothed him, and wrapped his broken heart in a stubborn, unwavering love that had never once faltered. To her, he had never been a curse. He was simply Mathias—a boy who had lost more than his parents and his innocence in a single breath and who deserved to be loved still.
For almost two decades now, Mathias had carried that love in the quiet bend of his shoulders, the wary set of his eyes, the soft patience of his movements. He had grown into a man shaped by sorrow but not devoured by it. The town still saw the Seer, someone who could at any given moment snap and go mad. Maeve still saw the boy she had saved.
Mathias’ hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. He could feelher eyes on him even now, from somewhere in the crowd. He didn’t look – he didn’t need to.
On the platform, the arguments were reaching a fever pitch.
“The Feast of the Black Flame is in two weeks!” the thickset man shouted. “Everyone will be in Irongate – the Queen, her court, her soldiers! They won’t march while the city feasts.”
“Aye,” someone else chimed in, eyes darting nervously. “Maybe we send someone. Find out what’s happening. Slip in with the crowds… to listen, learn.”
Another Elder shook her head so violently her scarf slipped askew. “And who would you send? Who among us is foolish enough to walk willingly into the Queen’s jaws?”
A heavy silence fell.
Mathias’s hand rose before he fully realised what he was doing.
“I’ll go,” he said, uncertain.
A hundred faces turned. The space around him grew colder.
“I’ll go,” he said, again, louder now.
The Elders stared. Some scoffed. Others made signs warding off evil.
The thickset man sneered. “The Seer? What good is a broken lad against the Queen’s hounds?”
Mathias swallowed hard. “A broken lad won’t be noticed.”
A ripple of cruel laughter. But one of the Elders, a woman with sharp eyes and a voice like a crow’s caw, leaned forward.
