“I brought her,” he went on, slower now, eyes sweeping across the crowd, “because the war will not end with her death. Because we’ve all lost too much to settle for vengeance that changes nothing. Because there might –”
He stopped, teeth pressed to the edge of the word. A voice cut through before he could find it again.
“You think we owe her mercy?”
The voice came from the front—a man near the well, arms crossed, his face weathered into scepticism so deep it had become a kind of armour. Mathias didn’t shy away from his gaze and instead met it with confidence he didn’t know he possessed.
The crowd shifted. Not yet quieting, but no longer rushing toward its breaking point. Some faces held fury like a flame cupped against the wind, but others – others were beginning to flicker with the pale beginnings of uncertainty.
“She should hang,” someone muttered, too far back to see but close enough to hear.
“She should burn,” jeered someone else, but the words no longer landed with certainty – they drifted, untethered, as if even the speaker wasn’t sure whether they meant it or merely needed something to say. Mathias let the silence stretch between them—not commanding it but standing still within it, letting the weight of what he had done settle over the square, like the tide pulling slowly and inevitable over a shoreline. He could feel their eyes – not just on her, sprawled on the stone like a warning unheeded, but on him, the fool who had gone to spy and come back with a monster in tow.
“I brought her,” he said again, his voice steady now, each wordmeasured, as if laying down something that could not be taken back. “Because if she dies here – like this, bound and broken, unnamed and unspoken for, left to rot in the dirt without trial, without reckoning, without even the decency of purpose – then we do not strike a blow for justice. We give them cause.”
The hush that followed wasn’t silence so much as restraint, the collective breath of a town teetering on the edge of fury and fear, caught between what they had lost and what they might still lose.
“Because theywillcome,” Mathias continued, and though he did not raise his voice, something in it deepened – not with defiance, but with the conviction of someone who had thought this through to the end. “Not out of duty. Not out of grief. But out of devotion. Because she is not just their commander – she is the flame they march behind, the name they call upon before battle, the one they bury their dead beneath. They have followed her through ruin, through slaughter, through a hundred kinds of hell, and if they hear she was butchered like an animal in a place too small to matter, they will not grieve. They willburn.”
He paused – not to wait for their response, but because the words had pressed against something raw in him, something that had sat heavy in his chest since the moment he’d passed the watchtowers of Tirn’vahl, since the moment he understood what it meant to bring her here.
“I know who she is,” he said then, more firmly now, the restraint falling away, his voice carrying farther across the stone. “And I know what she’s done. But I also know what I’ve seen. I heard the way they spoke her name in the city – not with fear, not with caution, but with reverence. They follow her not because they must, not because they are bound, but because they believe. Because when their world came undone, she gave them something to follow, and they still do.”
He drew a breath, slow and deliberate, and let his gaze pass acrossthe crooked rooftops and frost-numbed eaves of the town – this small, weathered place that had never asked to carry a war on its back.
“So if word reaches them that she’s fallen,” he said, his voice carrying clean across the square, “if they hear she was dragged through the mud and hanged like carrion, then they will come. Not to avenge a general. To reclaim a legend. And they will not stop at the square. They will burn their way through every stone between the sea and the marsh until her blood is answered for – and then some.”
He let that hang – not as a threat, but as a truth that needed no sharpening.
No one spoke for a long time.
Not the Elders, who stared at the bound figure in the square like a curse scrawled across the stones. Not the fishermen, their arms crossed over salt-stiff sleeves, nor the women with kindling still tucked under their aprons, nor the children peering from behind the folds of their mothers’ coats. The words had landed. Whether they had taken root was another matter entirely, but they hung in the air like smoke that refused to lift.
When an Elder, the woman with sharp eyes and a voice like a crow’s caw, stepped forward at last, as if it was the only thing left to do. She looked older than she had the day Mathias had left for Irongate, the weight of the crowd and the day and the decision dragging at her shoulders, drawing each word from her like coins from a miser’s hand.
“Then she lives,” she said, not with approval nor with mercy, but with the weary finality of a woman choosing the storm that might leave something standing. “For now.”
A murmur moved through the square, uneven and dull-edged. There was no cheer. No protest. Only a shifting of bodies, a glance exchanged, a sense of something unsettled being postponed. By afternoon, the square was empty again.
They carried the General through the winding streets – not gently,but not cruelly either – and brought her to the edge of Tirn’vahl, where the old temple still stood, half-forgotten beneath ivy and rot. Its roof had half-caved in years ago, and rain had worn grooves into the altar stones, but the foundation held. The doors, though swollen with time, still closed behind them.
She was laid in the corner where the altar had once been, her hands still bound, her breathing shallow, her face pale beneath the fading light. No guards were posted. Only Mathias remained; the iron key passed to his hand in silence by a man who could not meet his eye. The message had been clear enough. She was his responsibility now.
After lighting a fire, Mathias sat against the far wall, the blade he took from the General within reach but untouched, his coat folded behind him as a cushion, his hands resting loosely in his lap. He watched the dust shift in the air, the slow arc of a sparrow moving between the exposed beams overhead, the way the light softened the corners of this space. He did not quite know what to feel, only that the silence here was heavier than the silence in the square and more honest.
Maeve did not follow the others when they left the square. She slipped instead along the back path, where the grass grew long and the gravel gave way to damp earth, until she reached the edge of the old temple. Its roof sagged beneath the weight of ivy and years, and the door stood closed, swollen tight in its frame. She stopped there, just beyond the threshold, her shawl pulled close, though the wind had died. Her gaze did not waver. Not because she feared what was inside. But because her thoughts refused to settle, and the stillness here felt like the moment before a match is struck.
She had seen something – just a flicker at first, half-lost in the noise of the square, in the jostling of bodies and shouted names and the vicious glares of too many eyes. As they laid the woman down, her shirt had slipped at the collar, and for the briefest moment, the light caught on the bare skin of her shoulder. It wasn’t blood. Nor bruise. No,it was something else—a pattern, faint and uneven, like the memory of a hand once pressed there. Maeve couldn’t be sure – perhaps it had been nothing. A trick of the light. A smear. But the image clung to her with resolute insistence, refusing to loosen, and the longer she stood here with the wind tugging at her shawl, the more she felt it settle into her chest.
The thought held firm, steady as a tide, and her hand slipped into her pocket, fingers seeking the weight she had carried for years – until they closed, tight and certain, around the familiar shape of a dagger with a pearl hilt.
Chapter Seventeen: Benjadir
The wind in Harbour’s Bane always tasted of iron and rot – a damp taste that clung to the throat and refused to leave. The wind slipped through the tents, scattering the cold ashes of last night’s fires and setting the ridge banners trembling. Beyond the slope, the river dragged past in a slow, sullen current, and though the sun had climbed halfway up the sky already, its warmth seemed to shy away from the camp. Everything remained cool and shadowed, the air carrying a tension that made the camp feel smaller than it was.
Captain Benjadir stood near the edge of the makeshift command square, arms crossed loosely, gaze cast toward the north where the pale hills rolled into the grey-blue haze of distance. He had slept poorly, if at all, rising before the horn had sounded, long before the camp had shaken the dreams from its eyes. There had been no reports, no messengers, no ravens. That, in itself, should have been ordinary – no news meant the wheels turned as they ought to. But something about the stillness of this morning felt wrong. Like the lull before a blade drops.
The soldiers moved with a kind of rehearsed care, their drills precise but subdued, their voices low and clipped between orders. The usual clatter of the waking camp—the barked insults of sergeants, the banging of kettles, the metallic chime of weapons struck against whetstones—all of it seemed thinner somehow, strained, as if the sound itself didn’t quite know where to land. Even the horses stood quieter than usual, twitching their ears at some invisible anxiety.
