“Perhaps that’s the point,” she said. “Perhaps he would be missed there.”
“Perhaps he would not be missed here, though.” Someone in the crowd jeered.
Mathias felt the words like a slap. But he did not lower his hand.
An old woman—he realised it was Maeve when she got closer—pushed through the crowd then, her apron stained and her hair clinging damp to her cheeks. She seized his wrist, pulling his hand down.
“No,” she said fiercely. “He’s just aboy.”
The thickset man shrugged. “Better him than a whole town.”
Maeve rounded on them, her eyes blazing. “You would send him there todie.”
“We are all marked for death if we do nothing,” the Elder woman snapped. “Better we die fighting for a chance.”
Mathias wrenched his hand free, his heart hammering. “I can do it,” he said, louder this time. “I can get in and out. I’ll bring back what news I can.”
The thickset man snorted. “Or you’ll bring back nothing at all.”
Mathias met his gaze. “Maybe. But what else have we left?”
For a long, terrible moment, no one spoke. Then, slowly, the thickset man nodded. The others followed, one by one, reluctant but yielding. Fear, after all, made strange bedfellows.
Maeve pulled him aside as the crowd dispersed, her hands gripping his shoulders with desperate strength.
“You don’t have to prove anything to them,” she whispered.
He looked into her face, lined with care and sorrow, and felt a tight ache in his chest.
“It’s not for them,” he said softly. “It’s for us.”
She kissed his forehead, rough and swift. “Come back to me, boy.”
He nodded. But in his heart, he wasn’t sure if he could make that promise.
He left that same afternoon, with nothing but a satchel slung over one narrow shoulder and a battered knife tucked into his belt. He avoided the main roads, slipping through the marsh paths like a shadow, trusting in his smallness, his forgettability, to shield him.
The Mirefen marshes were a living thing, swallowing sound and form alike. Reeds hissed underfoot. Mud sucked at his boots. Waterbirds cried out mournfully overhead, their white bodies ghosting against the darkening sky.
Mathias moved carefully, quietly, the way a hunted thing moves. He knew the marshes better than most; he had grown up among their twisting paths and hidden sinkholes. But even he could not shake the feeling that the land itself conspired to turn him around, to lose him in the endless grey.
Night fell like a hammer, sudden and absolute. The salt mist thickened, cloaking the world in a cold, clinging embrace.
Mathias crouched beneath the roots of a half-drowned tree, pulling his cloak tight around him. His stomach growled, but he ignored it. Hunger was easier to bear than fear.
Somewhere beyond the mist, he knew, Irongate glittered like a blade – and beyond that, the Sorcerer Queen held her court of fire and blood.
Mathias closed his eyes.
He saw again the vision that had cursed him: flames rising, a crown tumbling from the burning heavens, his chest bloodied and scorched and torn open. The smoke filling his lungs, the heat peeling his skin, and above it all, the stars watching, cold and distant, offering neither mercy nor reprieve.
He was not brave. He was not strong. He was not the hero of any song or story. He was just a man with a death he could not escape, trying to do one good thing before it claimed him.
The mist curled tighter around him. He set his jaw, pulled himself to his feet, and pressed onward into the night.
Chapter Seven: Frejara
It had been three days since we left Haedor, but its ashes still clung to us, its scent still stitched into the seams of our cloaks, the taste of smoke and steel thick in the air between us and trailing in the hollows between each horse’s step. We rode through lands not torn apart by battle, but through something worse: the stillness that comes after. Villages crouched on the hillsides like animals too weary to flee. They bore the scars of conflict not in flames or broken stone, but in how clean they had become – too clean, as if scrubbed of defiance. The paint on the shutters had peeled where no one dared to repaint. Markets stood stocked and orderly but empty of noise. Laundry hung from ropes in rigid rows, unmoved by the wind.
