As the sun began to fall toward the western ridgeline, the road widened and the trees thinned, giving way to low stone walls and fields of flax. The colour struck me – soft blues and greens that caught thebreeze and rippled like a tide, peaceful in a way that felt unnatural after the last days of ash and stillness. We were entering territory that had not just surrendered to the Queen but accepted her reign long ago. This was not land recently taken – it was land reordered, reshaped in her image.
The village that came into view ahead of us was modest but intact. The roofs were thatched and recently patched. Smoke rose from chimneys in lazy spirals. A woman stepped out to sweep her threshold and paused, brush frozen mid-stroke, as she watched us approach. She didn’t bow or run. She simply stood there, still as a stone, watching us come.
When we passed, she nodded once, as if we were no more remarkable than a pack of traders on the move. Her eyes lingered on the cage at the rear, the brush forgotten in her hand. Whatever she saw, she kept it to herself.
A child darted across the road behind her, a flash of brown hair and bare feet. Laughter followed, thin but bright, like glass caught in sunlight. It felt out of place. Not wrong, exactly – but out of reach.
There were banners hung above the square – black silk and gold thread, the Queen’s colours. Not battle flags. Decorative. The kind used for festivals.
The Feast of the Black Fire was coming.
Here, in the heart of her dominion, it was not feared. It was prepared for. Expected. Celebrated.
And we were drawing closer with each step.
The further we rode, the more the land seemed to prepare itself. Villages no longer crouched – they stood upright, painted, polished. Courtyards and facades had been swept clean and festooned with garlands, and in every town square we passed, the signs of the coming Feast unfurled themselves more plainly: ribbons of black and gold wound around market stalls, fountains dyed with crimson water, brassbraziers cleaned and waiting.
The people, too, had changed. They no longer merely watched us pass. They greeted us now – not with warmth, but with rehearsed smiles, with nods held just long enough to show deference, with hands clutching children too tightly. Their eyes followed the cage. Their eyes always followed the cage.
Alaric had not spoken since Haedor, and though he sat at a distance, caged and half-hidden by the length of the procession, I could feel his presence pulling at me like a current beneath the surface – unseen, but impossible to ignore. There was no anger in his posture, no fear, only composure carefully held. and for reasons I couldn’t quite explain, it kept me at unease.
When we made camp again, it was on the outskirts of a town called Arnesh. The name meant nothing to me. It looked like all the others: too clean, too orderly, too awake. The kind of place that kept its windows spotless and its doors bolted just the same.
I took my rations apart from the others, seated on a stone at the edge of a barley field whose stalks stirred in the breeze like they were whispering to one another. In my hand, I turned the small dagger I always carried – not the one I fought with, but the other, older one. Its pearl handle had dulled over time; its blade still sharp, though it rarely left its sheath. It had been mine for as long as I could remember, and like the mark on my back or the scar across my palm, I had long since stopped wondering where it came from.
Behind me, I heard footsteps. Astrid, by the weight of them.
“They’re calling it the grandest Feast in a decade,” she said, crouching beside me, eyes scanning the field like it might rise up and bite us. “Spices from the south, blood acrobats, silks enough to drown in.”
“Isn’t that what every Feast promises?”
“Most don’t deliver.” She pulled a stalk of barley loose and twisted it between her fingers. “This one will. They’ve been planning it formonths. Even before Haedor.”
I looked at her. She wasn’t smiling.
“You don’t like it.”
Astrid snorted. “Like it? It’s grotesque. We’re dressing up a pyre and calling it theatre. And the people cheer because they’ve forgotten what screams sound like up close.”
I didn’t answer. She didn’t expect me to.
“You ever wonder about all of this—” she gestured vaguely towards our company and the cage they guarded. “- is really about… what did they say it was about again?” Her voice was uncharacteristically sombre. “Trade disputes. Broken treaties. Taxes.”
“What else would it be about?” I asked, though I already knew where she was going.
“I don’t know,” Astrid said. “But I don’t think it’s taxes.”
I glanced at her then, but she wasn’t looking at me.
“You think it too,” she said, more of a statement than a question. “I see it. In the way you grip your sword before we march. Like you’re trying to remind yourself it still means something.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. My sword is the Queen’s to command.”
Astrid raised an eyebrow, as if she didn’t believe that I would be so indifferent about it. “Even if the cause is rotten?”
I nodded, once. “Even then.”
“Why?”
