“What?” My voice broke against the inside of my throat. “What is it? What?”
Mathias didn’t answer. His mouth parted, then stilled, and his eyes flicked to Maeve’s – searching, unsure. Something passed between them, quick and unreadable. Then Maeve reached into the folds of her satchel and drew out a worn scrap of polished steel – the kind used for shaving or stitching – and held it out to me.
I took it, slow and uncertain, and tilted it toward the light.
At first, all I saw was the wreck of myself – hair damp with sweat,cheek streaked with blood from where I’d clawed at the stone in the throes of waking. My skin, drawn tight with the violence of whatever I’d just left behind. But then my gaze locked on my own eyes, and something inside me lurched.
The same blue, midnight deep. But haloed now – a ring of gold blazing around each pupil, sharp as sunlight on steel, bright as a forge-fire. Not a glint, not the trick of the morning light, but something flaming and alive, as if fire itself had taken root behind my eyes.
The steel bit into my trembling fingers – cold and sharp. It didn’t feel like a mirror but like a fragment of something broken, catching the face of a stranger, with eyes alight in a terrifying, alien fire. I gripped it tighter, the sharp edge digging into my palm, a thin line of crimson welling up and tracing the curve of my knuckles.
Then Maeve’s hands were there – cool, deliberate – folding around mine without force, uncurling my fingers one by one, the shard sliding from my grip like a breath exhaled. Blood welled along two of the cuts, dark against the tremor-soft flesh, and she cupped my hand like it was something fragile. Her thumb swept slow across the skin, wiping away the blood in careful arcs, not to erase the wound but to soothe it. As if she’d done it a hundred times before. As if she had waited her whole life to do it now.
Maeve’s hand left mine only long enough to reach into the satchel at her side. She drew something out – wrapped in linen, worn soft from years of folding – and softly placed it in my palm. The cloth held no weight, and yet my hand trembled beneath it. I didn’t need to open it to know. I felt it in the shape that met my skin – the curve of the hilt, smooth and impossibly familiar, the cool press of pearl settling against my blood-warmed flesh. It was not the dull blade I had carried with me since longer than I can remember. It was not the one I had taken from the pyre at Irongate, just a hilt now, the steel of it having melted in the black flames. It was a third one, one I had not touched before, but one Ihad started to suspect existed somewhere in the world, waiting for me to find it. My fingers curled around it as if they had done so a hundred times before, and Maeve gently pressed her hand over mine again.
“It’s time, Unbroken Blade,” she said with a tremble in her voice. “It’s time I tell you what I know.”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Frejara
The fire had guttered low, but the heat lingered – pressed into the seams of stone, thick and heavy. The dagger lay nestled in my palm, its pearl hilt warming slowly beneath fingers still slick with sweat and blood. I held it not for comfort, but because it was there – real and solid – when nothing else felt either. Mathias’s arm remained looped around my shoulders, the coarse wool of his sleeve brushing the curve of my neck with each uneven breath, anchoring me to a moment I hadn’t yet decided to stay in. I kept my gaze fixed downward, away from him, away from Maeve, tracing the curve of the blade with my thumb, as if its shape alone might unravel the chaos tightening somewhere deep in my chest.
The words of the blood-soaked woman in the dreamlike chamber echoed through me, strange and unwelcome, as if they’d been hurled into my body with too much force, their meaning splintering on impact rather than settling into sense.
“I am her mother.”
The visions twisted as I turned them over, trying to map them ontowhat I had seen: the woman on the floor, her nightgown torn and soaked with blood, and Mowgara standing over her, her hands stained as if the violence of it belonged to her. I tried to make the pieces lock into place, but they slid past one another, refusing to hold. The more I forced them, the more it seemed to scrape against something raw and misaligned, like pressing on a wound before it’s closed. My pulse hadn’t settled since I woke, but it climbed even higher now, kindled by the first stirrings of anger, rising to guard the hollow where fear took hold.
I shifted the blade in my grip, letting its weight roll between my fingers until the hilt faced upward. The pearl caught what little light there was – soft, luminous – but it was the mark at its base that held me still: a single letter, carved clean –I. My breath caught, shallow and jagged. I’d seen these engravings before: once on the dagger I’d carried since I was old enough to understand it was mine, and again on the hilt I’d taken from the black pyre at Irongate. My fingers tightened, the edge dipping slightly toward my thigh as I turned to Maeve, the question already rising like smoke from a lit fuse.
“Where did you get this?” The words came sharper than I meant them, laced with something that felt too close to accusation. I felt Mathias shift beside me – not away, but closer, his hand tightening slightly where it rested near my shoulder, a pressure just firm enough to remind me I wasn’t alone in what had just come to pass. That he, too, had seen what I had seen. That we were standing on the same crumbling ledge, waiting for the pieces to settle.
Maeve’s hands loosened, then withdrew with the same careful precision she brought to salve and stitches, as if even that small retreat demanded it. She looked to Mathias first, and something passed between them – not loud, not seen, but weighted – the kind of exchange that leaves the air heavier in its wake.
Then her gaze returned to me – still measured, but no longeruntouched, something wary flickering just beneath the calm, like a door held half-shut against a rising wind. “I had to be certain,” she said quietly, the syllables soft but shaped with purpose. “I wanted to tell you before. But until now, I didn’t know for sure.”
The heat that had been coiling low in my chest rose all at once, jagged and burning, as if Maeve’s calm alone had been enough to spark it loose.
“You had to be sure?” I said, the words scraping past my teeth. “You sit beside me for days, tending wounds like you were waiting for something to fall into place.” I felt the dagger shift in my hand, heavier somehow, as if it too was waiting for an explanation. “You’ve been circling something since the moment we met. Just say it.”
Maeve didn’t bristle, didn’t push back. She only looked at me with that same, unbearable steadiness – but now I could see it, the weight behind it, worn, like fabric thinned by too many winters.
“You’ve every right to be angry,” she said – and this time, the words didn’t sting for what they were, but because she meant them. “There’s much you were never told. And you deserve to know.”
I shifted, breath catching, a retort half-formed, but what came out instead were words I hadn’t meant to say – sudden and biting. “You speak in riddles, old woman. Speak plainly.”
As soon as I heard myself, I froze. I’d said that once before. To Alaric, by the still-burning city of Haedor. Maeve watched the moment land in me like a key turning in a lock.
“No riddles,” she said. “But to understand where we are now, we have to go back to the beginning.”
She turned slightly toward the fire, though her gaze didn’t catch on the flame—fixed instead on something flickering just beyond it. “It was Drizzna the Deceiver who started it all,” Maeve said then, each word heaving itself out before it could leave her. “She stole the Dragon Fire and shared it only with her blood-sisters - the first Seven. Thatwas the shape it took from then on. Always seven. Always the same line, passed from mother to daughter – bound not just by blood, but by choice; sisters in lineage and in purpose, each carrying a part of what none should bear alone.”
I let out a sharp breath, bitter and hard. “I know the tales,” I said, the words edged with heat I didn’t try to hide. “Mother made me learn them before I could even read. I could recite every verse, every song in my sleep.” I shifted where I sat, the dagger still clenched in my hand. “So, unless you’re planning to sing them too, get to the part that matters.”
If Maeve was stung by the bite in my words, she didn’t show it – she only watched me for a long moment, as if weighing not what to say, but how much I was ready to hear. Then, gently, she tilted her head, the firelight drawing long shadows along the line of her jaw.
“You know the tales,” she said, slowly. “And you know the songs. But do you know what became of them?” Her hands rested in her lap, fingers laced, still. “Seven sisters, always. That was the way of it. Until now.” She paused, not for effect, but because the words that followed came heavier. “So where are they, child? If the fire runs in the blood… why does Mowgara stand alone?”
I said nothing. Her words had landed softly but hit hard – scattering through my memory like something dropped and shattered.
