He pressed a hand to his eyes, scrubbing at the fatigue, trying to clear the cobwebs from his mind, to find clarity in this sudden, impossible crossroads. His gaze swept back to her and then outward, towards the unseen horizon, where the invading host surely waited. The sheer, overwhelming scale of the Queen’s ambition was a force of nature, a tide that threatened to drown all in its path, and his home stood precariously on the very edge of that coming storm.
What if her capture could buy time? A desperate, audacious gamble, perhaps, but a gamble that might just hold the lives of his people in its slender thread. She was the Queen’s Blade— absent now, inexplicably – and that absence was not yet known. That absence was power. And power, misdirected or intercepted, might sow enough confusion, enough uncertainty, to stall the relentless march. Her army, leaderless, might falter or turn its gaze inward, away from the coastal plains where Tirn’vahl lay exposed. Or, in the quiet of confinement, stripped of the clamour of command, perhaps she could be brought to see the futility of this war, of bloodshed for bloodshed’s sake. To convince her to halt the advance, to turn her army away from the shores he loved. It was a hope as faint as a distant star, yet in the encroaching darkness, it was the only light he could find.
This was not a choice made of comfort, nor of clear victory. It was a choice born of necessity, of the chilling clarity that came when all other options vanished like mist in the morning sun. He crouched again, his knees aching, the cold long since soaked into the seams of his boots. She had not moved. Her breath was still faint and uneven,the wound on her brow dark with blood. She looked no more dangerous than a fallen girl – but the danger was not in her now. It was in what her absence meant. In what her recovery might alter. In the brittle, breakable span of time between now and when the Queen would notice her missing.
The decision, when it finally settled in him, was not a rush but the cold, heavy fall of a stone in a deep well. It was the quiet, terrible acceptance of a burden, a solitary act against an unimaginable force.
He would bind her, secure her, and take her home with him.
Chapter Sixteen: Mathias
The first sign of home was the smoke – steady, rising in languid curls from the chimneys that dotted the slope above the inlet, soft against the morning light. Tirn’vahl always smelt of salt and peat and the kind of damp that settled into the bones of things, but that morning the scent seemed sharper, touched with something watchful. Mathias saw the rooftops next, familiar in their sag and tilt, patched over the years with whatever the sea hadn’t stolen. Beyond them, the crooked spine of the old watchtower jutted against the sky, leaning slightly west, as if bracing itself against the wind. Somewhere, beyond the harbour, gulls wheeled and called; their cries were thin and melancholic.
The houses that lined the main road stood close and stooped, their lintels low and warped by sea wind, and from behind the warped shutters and salt-glossed panes, faces began to emerge—careful, half-shadowed, unwilling to commit to what they were seeing. A boy paused with a pail in his hand, one foot already off the stoop, gaze flicking between the horses and the figure tied to the second saddle. A womanwith white-streaked hair pressed her fingertips to her mouth, as if to trap the words before they could escape. Across the street, a man reached for the latch on his door and then thought better of it, choosing instead to stare through the gap, like a sentry watching the first shadow fall across the walls.
Frejara’s horse moved reluctantly behind his own, its steps uneven. The body it carried made no protest, offered no sign of life beyond the steady rise and fall of breath beneath her mud- and blood-soaked shirt. Her bindings had held through the night, and though her wrists were red where the rope had bitten in, she had not stirred. She wore no ceremonial armour now, only simple travel clothes, dirtied by the road and torn near the hem—the kind of garb that would have rendered her anonymous in any other town. But not here, not today.
Glaring eyes followed them all the way to the town square.
It sloped gently into view – wide and rain-dark, scattered with the quiet remnants of market morning. Tarps hung loose from the stalls, their corners flapping softly in the breeze. A crate had toppled near the well, its contents already picked clean by gulls.
He dismounted slowly, legs stiff from the ride, and turned back to the second horse, letting the reins fall slack as he reached for her. She was cold to the touch, her skin pale as if the ride and the sea air had drained the last of its warmth. Her head lolled forward as he untied her, and for a moment he thought she might wake – but her lashes did not move, her jaw stayed slack, and she made no sound. Just the weight of her, fragile and disconcertingly light, sagging in his arms.
Here, in his arms, the General of Irongate – the Unbroken Blade of the Sorcerer Queen – did not look like a conqueror. She looked like a soldier pulled from the wreckage of a war, limbs slack with exhaustion, face bloodless and hollow with strain. He laid her on the stone in the centre of the square, not roughly, not reverently—simply because there was nowhere else—and stepped back, breathing shallow fromthe effort.
Around him, the murmuring had begun – low at first and fragmented, too many voices trying not to speak too loudly, as if the words themselves were dangerous. He did not need to hear the phrases to know them. And hers echoed now in every sidelong glance, every twitch of a jaw, every shiver that had nothing to do with cold.
Somewhere near the back, Aunt Maeve stood stiff among the crowd, her shawl wrapped tightly against the wind. Her lips were pressed into a thin, white line, and her eyes fixed first on Mathias and then on the woman on the ground. The General’s shirt had shifted as she was laid down – torn slightly at the collar, the fabric hanging loose across one shoulder. Maeve’s lips parted as if she was about to say something, but she then breathed whatever words she was about to part with back into her chest. Her eyes, though, wide as saucers now, were wild with something Mathias didn’t remember ever seeing before.
A second ripple passed through the crowd as more townspeople emerged—not in a rush, but with the same slow gravity as a tide coming in, inevitable and full of things dredged up from the depths.
There was a pause, wide and heavy, in which no one stepped closer, but no one left either. The square brimmed with eyes, with breath held half-drawn, with the kind of silence that did not soothe but scraped. And then, the first voice rose like a stone thrown into still water—so loud as to break the surface.
“What is this madness, Mathias?”
“She burned Haedor.” Cried another, sharp and laced with betrayal.
The murmuring erupted into shouting – not in unison, but in jagged bursts, with voices tripping over each other, sharp and ragged, filled with old grief that had sharpened into fury. Some pointed, others shoved.
“She’ll finish what her mother started.”
A woman with tears on her cheeks called him a traitor. A fishermanraised his hand as if to strike and only lowered it when another held him back. The square had teeth now, and they were bared.
“You think we’re safe with that monster in our midst?”
He felt it building – not just the anger, but the fear beneath it. The kind that couldn’t be reasoned with. And they had already chosen who they wanted to blame. They weren’t looking at her as she was—bound, unconscious, more a ghost than a soldier. They saw only the name they had cursed for years. The General. The Sorcerer Queen’s spawn. The shadow on the hill before the fire came.
“Bring death to our door, why don’t you, boy!”
Mathias stood with his jaw clenched so tightly it ached, tasting metal behind his teeth. He let the initial storm break over him, absorbing the venom without flinching, his own heart a quiet anchor in the tempest. It came in waves, each sharper than the last – names spat like curses, old grievances ripped raw, every word burning hotter than the last, driven less by anger than by the raw ache of loss. Someone called him a fool. Another, a snake. But most didn’t name him at all. They named her instead, spitting her name like a curse, as if contempt alone could strip it of its power or erase the blood already spilt.
He knew these people – not just their names, but their griefs, their losses: Elenna, whose brother never came home, and Bram, who buried his son in spring. Their faces were not strangers. Their fury had roots.
For a long while, he said nothing. There was no defence that would not sound hollow; no words would hold against the weight of their anger. So he waited, letting the unrest twist and turn in the square until it began to falter, until the noise dulled into something uncertain – and then, he raised his voice.
“I brought her here,” he said, low at first – not quiet, but measured, the words shaped with the care of someone laying a blade on the stone to be sharpened. “Not to protect her. Not to forgive her. And not because I’ve forgotten who or what she is.”
There was no silence to receive him, only the restless murmur of people not yet ready to listen – the crack of shifting weight, the scrape of boots against stone, and the low pulse of mistrust that hung in the air like smoke that would not lift.
